I can't believe in 2015 PuTTY is still a thing.

Other platforms have a half dozen terminal programs, three of which are usually very good, and Windows has one that looks like it was hacked together on a weekend in 1998.

There is no analogy to putty on a Unix platform, because its not just implementing the console interface, its also the SSH implementation as well, on Unix systems, its pretty easy to write a fully functioning terminal, because your just hooking into the existing pty system, so all you need to do is write (or borrow) a competent vt100 emulation, and make a UI.

PuTTY is great, honestly. It's not pretty, but neither is the windows console nor PowerShell.

It's an ssh client. It is robust, easy to install and it works well.

How much energy do you expect me to waste evaluating and choosing new ones when the one I have works just fine the way it is? I have better things to be doing.

This is the poison in the open source world. If you have something that works "well enough" but never evolves, it holds everyone back. The barrier to entry is fairly high for an application like this, so I'm not saying this is an easy thing to fix, but it's worth fixing.

Linux in particular is filled with "well enough" solutions that should be striving to be better. Although there's misfires when controversial things like systemd happen, there has been steady improvement in other areas. Imagine if Nginx had never happened, if NCSA httpd was "good enough"?

The Windows user base deserves better than PuTTY.

But whats wrong with PuTTY?, is it missing features?, I mean. like it has full SSH support, its easy to use, and has a non-quirky terminal emulator.. I guess it could have more terminal types, but there are closed source options for that, like Reflections.

Mostly it seems like overkill to run a ssh server + client to get a local terminal.

I've been using putty since 2007 for managing remote unix systems. It's nice to have a uniform interface for everything. If I ever get to a point where using putty becomes a headache for some reason (and it hasn't in 8 years) then I'll switch to mintty. Mintty is definitely a better way to run the windows gui stuff from the command line if you care to do that (I just use the start menu to run windows gui apps).

Occasionally I get tripped up on linux terminals due to the additional requirement that I "ctrl-c" to activate a copy, but that is extremely minor since that method of copy/paste is shared by almost every other tool I use except for putty.

Copy/pasting long lines of text from the terminal...so tired of fixing all the broken lines manually.