An opinionated assessment of SmarTTY

[gammamu]

SmarTTY is currently my favorite SSH client for Windows.

I like it so much I continue to use it (and expectantly check in for updates!!) despite its flaws.

The Great:
– The tab handling. This arrangement is the best I have ever used.
– It uses normal OpenSSH keys
– Easy to use, built-in SCP!

The ugly:
– Out-dated crypto. I really do not want to have diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1 and hmac-sha1 enabled on any of my servers, but I’m obliged to on the servers I connect directly to if I wish to use SmarTTY.
– Pastes from Windows + [RETURN] sometimes yield a ^M in console. The arrow keys produce a similar result.
– The horizontal scroll bar pops up all the time and hides the command line. I copy command from the CL a lot, so this is quite annoying. (IMO, there shouldn’t even be a horizontal scroll bar; content should wrap.)
– The SCP transfer pane won’t disappear unless I select View>SCP Transfers and then select it again.
– Minimalistic mode: Desirable, but too annoying to use as a mouse-triggered event. It probably ought to be key-triggered, like Alt works in many Windows softwares.
– Single lines are copied as multiple lines if they wrap in the terminal screen. A 568-character line is still a line, not multiple lines.
– Ctrl-C is a program break, but if I use it as that it also functions as a copy operation, over-writing the clipboard contents.

The wishful:
– The left (sever-level) tabs ought to have a + option to open a connection to a new server, just as the bottom tabs do.
– When adding a new server connection, the port option ought to be separate. Typing it with the server IP is unintuitive to a new user.
– The ‘Select a Host’ dialogue is awkward, in large part due to the large icons. There could be an option to make this a list or use smaller icons.

[ckloiber]

I have a few suggestions to make using SmarTTY easier (at least for me). All of these should be available as options, if not a default action.

1) Allow forcing all new sessions to start at a fixed size (in my case 80×24) instead of the size of the last open window.

2) When clicking the icon (pinned to the taskbar, but probably everywhere) optionally open a new window rather than focus the existing window. (currently you need to right click and select StartTTY to get another window).

Here are a few things I consider bugs that could be fixed:

1) Trying to copy text from near the bottom or top of the minimalist view is nearly impossible as the menu or tab appears and moves the text you are targeting. Going after that moved text closes the menu/tabs, moving the text again. Catch-22. I personally prefer separate windows anyway, so I’d suggest allowing disabling tabs completely.

2) I use clusterssh extensively from a remote jumpbox, but I often accidentally close my SmarTTY window, or the main CSSH window. This leaves all the child windows open, but they no longer respond to input or the X to close them. You wind up having to force close Ming, and use Task Manager to kill SmarTTY. Perhaps you could find a way to handle this case more gracefully?

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