Still paying for XShell? I choose this super awesome SSH client, it's free!

I have shared the SSH client of FinalShell, which is also the SSH client tool commonly used by xiaoz. FinalShell is easy to use, but what makes me uncomfortable is that as the number of tabs increases, FinalShell gets more and more stuck, and its memory usage is also relatively high.

I recently discovered a cross-platform SSH client WindTerm developed in C language, which is completely free for commercial and non-commercial use, without restrictions. All published source codes (except third-party directories) are provided under the terms of the Apache-2.0 license. Performance is also much better than FinalShell and Electerm.

The main function

The following content is machine translation:

• Implemented SSH v2, Telnet, Raw Tcp, serial, and Shell protocols.
• Supports SSH automatic execution during session authentication.
• Support SSH ProxyCommand or ProxyJump.
• Support SSH agent forwarding. Introduction video
• Support SSH automatic login using password, public key, keyboard interaction, gssapi-with-mic.
• Support X11 forwarding. Introduction video
• Support direct/local port forwarding, reverse/remote port forwarding and dynamic port forwarding.
• Supports XModem, YModem and ZModem.
• Integrate sftp and scp clients, support downloading, uploading, deleting, renaming, creating new files/directories, etc.
• Integrated local file manager, support move to, copy to, copy from, delete, rename, new file/directory, etc.
• Support Windows Cmd, PowerShell and Cmd, PowerShell as administrator.
• Support Linux bash, zsh, powershell core, etc.
• Supports MacOS bash, zsh, powershell core, etc.

There are so many functions, I won’t paste them one by one.

Install WindTerm

WindTerm supports three platforms (Windows, Linux, macos), go to Github: https://github.com/kingToolbox/WindTerm/releases to download the latest version.

Windows users directly unzip WindTerm_2.x.x_Windows_Portable.zip and double-click WindTerm.exe to use it.

Set up and use

The author introduced various features and instructions on his blog, see: https://kingtoolbox.github.io/, I have sorted out some commonly used setting options, I hope to help you.

• Set terminal font

WindTerm does not implement the function of setting the font as a window option, but we can do it by modifying the theme file. The dige-black theme used by default, open: global\themes\dige-black\scheme.theme in the WindTerm directory and find:

{
            "name": "text.default",
            "style": {
                "foreground": "#F8F8F2",
                "background": "#1c1c1c",
                "fontFamily": "Microsoft-Yahei-Mono,Consolas Yahei Hybrid,Roboto Mono, Fira Code Retina, Lucida Sans Typewriter, Lucida Console, Monoca",
                "fontSize": 11
            }
        }

Just modify the fontFamily attribute.

• Set window transparency

Open View-Window Opacity-Custom Opacity in the top window and set according to your preferences, as shown in the figure below.

• Configuration synchronization

If you need to use WindTerm on multiple computers and want the session information to be synchronized, you can directly synchronize the profiles folder under WindTerm with a network disk. It's a pity that WindTerm does not support custom profiles path, I hope to support it in the future.

• Turn off automatic screen lock

For security reasons, WindTerm automatically locks the screen after 30 minutes by default and requires the user to enter a password. If you don’t want to automatically lock the screen, you can modify global\wind.config and set application.lockScreenTimeout to 0 or a negative number (you need to restart the customer) end).

• Shortcut command

A very practical function, you can add frequently used and difficult to remember commands to the shortcut commands, which is convenient for quick use next time. Click the gear button at the bottom right and add it according to the prompts.

• Setting up a springboard

When you have a poor connection to a VPS network, you can also log in through any existing machine as a springboard, and you only need to edit Session - SSH - Proxy - Jump Server 1 to select.

There are many more features of WindTerm, so I won’t introduce them one by one. Those who are interested can check out the author’s blog: https://kingtoolbox.github.io/

About performance

The author released the performance test data on Github. WindTerm is developed in C language, and the performance is naturally not weak. However, as an SSH tool, it does not seem to need very good performance, as long as it is not stuck, does it. I subconsciously took a look at the memory usage of WindTerm is only about 70M, which is much better than FinalShell which eats 2G of memory.

finally

WindTerm is rich in functions and fully meets the needs of operation and maintenance personnel. It is also no problem to replace Xshell and FinalShell. But WindTerm is not perfect. For example, many options have not been set in the window, and the configuration file can only be modified manually, which is somewhat inconvenient. According to the author, multi-language support will also be launched in the next version, and I hope WindTerm will do better in the future.

Source: xiaoz.me/archives/16314