MobaXterm – (Free) All-in-one Xserver/SSH/Linux environment for Windows

Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

I recently stumbled on MobaXterm. It’s a complete unix enviroment including X Server/SSH/Telnet/SCP/FTP client all in one. The list of features is impressive to say the least. This is an excellent replacement for Putty.

A small selection of the most useful features:

• Free. What more is there to say?
• Tabs and Horizontal / Vertical split panels finally bring the full power of native Unix/Linux terminal emulators to Windows
• Integrated X server. MobaXterm comes with an integrated X Server. Everything is set up correctly out-of-the-box. X11 forwarding means you can simply SSH to a remote machine and start X11 programs. It supports displaying remote X11 windows as native windows or you can run the X Server ina separate tab/window.
• Session Management makes it easy to quickly connect to the machine you want.
• Integrated SFTP when SSHing to a remote machine means you don’t have to start a separate SFTP/SCP session. Just browse, upload and download remote files from the left side of the SSH session.
• Many supported services, such as SSH, Telnet, local Linux/Cygwin terminal, local Windows command prompt, RSH, XDMCP, RDP, VNC, FTP, etc.
• Session multiplexing provides a quick method of running commands on multiple machines at the same time.
• SSH bouncing through a gateway SSH server means no more SSHing from machine to machine.
• Cygwin environment so you can actually get some work done natively on Windows. Batteries, bells, whistles and kitchen sinks (as well as games) included: full unix environment with tools like grep, find, vim, etc, etc, etc.

There are countless more features. This is the terminal emulator app I always hoped Putty would become. Of all the different shells around Putty, separate SSH connection managers and terminals I’ve tried, this is by far the best one.