Best Free Telnet/SSH Terminal Emulator

Terminal emulators provide a telnet or SSH connection to UNIX like servers. Commercial products can emulate a wealth of terminal types, provide GUI face-lifting etc. All very nice, but this can leave the emulator feeling sluggish. Free implementations are more focused on the job at hand — providing a fast no-frills connection.

There is no shortage of candidates so I am presenting a couple of mature offerings followed by some modern projects.

Most free products only offer a narrow range of screen emulations, typically vt100, linux or xterm. As a full time support analyst I considered support for the following features as my essential criteria …

• Configureable function key sequences
• Configureable answerback message
• Local printing

Without these accessing or supporting legacy green screen systems is likely to be problematic.

Dave’s Telnet was the only package to offer all three — albeit some manually. It offers emulation for linux/xterm/vt100/vt220/vt320/vt440. Dave’s Telnet replaced my commercial product for a week with only a couple of minor points. Copy and paste functions seemed clunky and it failed to connect to one hostname, I had to specify the IP address.

PuTTY is another very popular mature package, but only offers xterm emulation. It does not appear to support an answerback message or configurable function keys. However in the case of function keys this may not be applicable to xterm emulation. PuTTY has been incorporated into many related projects.

Both choices are maintained, but new releases are infrequent.

Two packages I reviewed just missed a recommendation, but remain on my watch list.

Poderosa provides a modern tabbed environment offering vt100/xterm/kterm emulations and the ability to extend with plugins. It offers no obvious support for my criteria, but proved robust as a basic terminal emulator with a useful context menu available from right click. Another interesting feature is auto complete based on previously typed commands. This may be of interest to system administrators or those requiring basic remote access. Requires .NET v2 to be installed. Unfortunately this project seems to have gone the way of the Dodo with no updates since 2006. This is a great shame for a project that could easily have become my hands down winner over time.

Terminals is a more general remote access package including a vt220 terminal emulator. It provides a tabbed environment offering the ability to connect using telnet/Remote Desktop/VNC and others. It also provides over a dozen network analysis options, including ping, traceroute and whois. Again no obvious support for my criteria. I encountered stability issues using Windows 2000, although no definitive list of supported versions is given. This may be of interest to system administrators looking after a wide range of machine types. Currently being actively developed.

Dave’s Telnet
Website: http://dtelnet.sourceforge.net/
Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=8188
Author: Dave Cole et al
Current Version: 1.2.4
Version Date: 05-May-2006
License: GNU GPL
Download File Size: 122 Kb
Operating Systems Supported: 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista?
Additional Software Required: No
64 Bit Capable: No
Portable Version Available: Program does not need installing
Non-English Languages Supported: None
 

PuTTY
Website: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
Download Link: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
Author: Simon Tatham et al
Current Version: beta 0.60
Version Date: 29-Apr-2007
License: Free, Open Source (MIT License)
Download File Size: 444 Kb
Operating Systems Supported: 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista Unix
Additional Software Required: No
64 Bit Capable: No
Portable Version Available: Yes
Non-English Languages Supported: None
 

Poderosa
Website: http://en.poderosa.org/present/about_poderosa.html
Download Link: http://en.poderosa.org/download/binary.html
Author: Daisuke Okajima et al
Current Version: 4.1.0
Version Date: 22-Nov-2006
License: Apache License, Version 2.0
Download File Size: 2 MB
Operating Systems Supported: NT4.0/Me/2000/XP/2003
Additional Software Required: .NET Framework 2.0
64 Bit Capable: No
Portable Version Available: No
Non-English Languages Supported: None
 

Terminals
Website: http://www.codeplex.com/Terminals/
Download Link: http://www.codeplex.com/Terminals/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx
Author: Rob Chartier et al
Current Version: 1.6l
Version Date: 11-May-2008
License: Microsoft Shared Source Community License (MS-CL)
Download File Size: 1.9 MB
Operating Systems Supported: 2000?/XP/Vista/2003?
Additional Software Required: .NET Framework
64 Bit Capable: No
Portable Version Available: No
Non-English Languages Supported: None
 

This software category is maintained by volunteer editor Adrian Cornforth.