next question: why are people still using putty

Putty met my needs in 2004 and my needs haven't changed. It still works as good in 2024.

I'm not 100% sure when I started using putty, but I definitely used it in 2004. I still need a ssh client and terminal emulator for Windows. I still don't want to install a unix like environment just to have a terminal. I still don't want tabs in my terminal, lots of windows works just fine. I still need X11 forwarding so I can run programs on remote systems and display them on Windows (VcXsrv is an easier to get going X server than others I've used on Windows).

I might like to have something that can do whatever magic so I can gcloud and aws auth on my remote machine without cutting and pasting giant urls and auth blobs to and fro all the time; but I'm using a auth token that needs to stay connected to the windows machine. In a more integrated corp environment this would probably be keberos/active directory/magic?

The difference in 2024 is that windows ships openssh client and server as a built-in optional component and it also ships a workable terminal emulator. No WSL needed in either case.

(But yeah I'm still using putty, too)

same. if i want a term, it's putty. windows shell and builtin ssh is a backup for when i am working from a foreign system

Microsoft stopped shipping HyperTerminal, last I checked. It wasn't really worth the effort to make it do SSH.

I'm not really a fan of cmd or powershell, although I guess I could use them in a pinch. Wouldn't look like what I'm used to though. :p

HyperTerminal is for greybeards :)

What was meant is Windows Terminal

I've started to dropping of Putty since WSL1 and later native openssh-client landed into Windows. I was missing ability to use ~/.ssh/config - comparing to Putty's GUI way of changing things, especially en-masse, like updating JumpHost for 10+ servers (saved session in Putty terms) and no inheritance of options.

So I'm not using Putty since I guess ~ 2018 or so. Not insisting other should stop using it, of course.

Because Windows does not have a good SSH implementation and PuTTY has always worked extremely well for me as a serial and SSH terminal (also, it starts up instantly and never crashed on me).

Are there any better alternatives?

Doesn't Windows ship OpenSSH these days?

It does. I use Windows Terminal and the native OpenSSH client literally daily.

Many people I know just use SSH from the WSL CLI.

That's a very limited terminal in terms of capabilities.

Then there's things like x11-style copy-paste.

PuTTY is from before WSL, and old habits die hard.

You can run SSH from a Windows terminal without even having the WSL installed...

I do like 99% of the time and in quite specific cases from the host machine (Windows native openssh) - mainly due to my environment is in WSL in terms of dotfiles, cmd line prompt, shell history and so on.

Windows 10 natively supports SSH as far as I can tell, I don’t use it a ton, but haven’t had any issues just typing ssh username@domain

I like having a library of hosts to choose and maybe multiple tabs in one place, and although there are some slightly less cumbersome PuTTY frontends like KiTTY (please keep your expectations very very low), I'll rather use WinSCP (no quantum leap in usability either). Edit: to those suggesting W10 command line - yes it's there and works, but it's just that, a command line, not much help when you have dozens of servers.

I used to use KiTTY, because it is more versatile.

They're used to it, tutorials online recommend it, admins install it out of inertia, some places have old Windows versions, etc.

Why shouldn't people use putty?

I still use putty because it does what I need for it to do. No need to change just because MS has their own terminals application, which besides I far from trust.

You trust them to run the entire OS and every stack included in it, but not to make an ssh client?

There's trust in the security sense, which yeah, you're stuck with the whole deal.

But there's also trust in the rely on sense. Which at least I try to compartmentalize. I can trust Microsoft (or Google) to make an OS I can rely on to run other people's apps. If Microsoft or Google want to provide apps, they'll be evaluated as they are, not with a bias because the OS provider shipped them.

The client shipped with Windows is literally OpenSSH.

I don't have a problem using OpenSSH, really. But I'm not going to use a Microsoft terminal emulator, unless it has some advantage over the terminal emulator I've been using for decades, when the Microsoft product has no advantage other than Microsoft included it with the OS so I can save a 3.5 MB download. Same reason I don't use Internet Explorer / Edge / new Edge or Windows Media Player. On a level playing field, I would never use those products (well that's not true, IE 3 was ok when it came out, IE 4 and 6 were good when they were new, but I don't have a time machine), so why use them because the field is unlevel.

its great for serial and raw on windows.

There's some obscure settings that putty supports that other terminals do (did?) not. It's been a while so I don't remember all the details, but for example, some systems expected the DEL key and not Ctrl-C to interrupt. You can change the interrupt key with `stty` on other terminals, but it only allows setting the key to a single character, and DEL is typically an escape sequence.