While moving from the Windows to Mac OS is a nice experience, you would miss the PuTTY system on Mac if you have been used to using it on Windows. Whether you are a system admin or a website owner, it’s a common application that most of us have used at least once in their lifetime.
PuTTY is a free terminal emulator that helps you transfer files over the same network, by logging from another computer. It can also be accessed over the internet. You can secure the file transfer facility by adding SCP and SFTP. Security is the biggest concern with PuTTY, but you can add verification and encryption by using it in combination with SSH. This helps shield the connections over the internet.
ADVERTISEMENT
Installation using Homebrew: First, install the ‘brew command line’ Once installed use the below-given command to install PuTTY:-sudo brew install putty; Installation using MacPorts: First of all, one must install MacPorts and then use the command-line to install PuTTY. Here is the command to install PuTTY via MacPorts sudo port install putty. First, install the PuTTY than you can run PuTTYgen on Mac. From the top menu, go to Finder and opt for Go → utilities. Then search the terminal, which supports SSH connections to remote servers. Various multiples options are available to install PuTTY, which is Mac Port. First, install PuTTY for Mac using brew install putty or port install putty (see below). This will also install the command-line version of puttygen, the PuTTY key generator tool. Then, use the following command to convert the.ppk format private key to a standard PEM format private key: puttygen privatekey.ppk -O private-openssh -o privatekey.
While many dedicated users still prefer using PuTTY, it can be tough for those who have recently shifted to Mac. So, here’s a quick list of some of the best PuTTY alternative for Mac OS that we think can make your life easy.
Terminal
It’s the default terminal emulator that comes embedded in the Mac OS. It’s a wonderful tool that helps break down into the command line. So, when you are logged into multiple servers, you will easily be able to identify the special background colors and the window titles mentioned in profiles. You can either use the built-in profiles in the Terminal or can even make your own custom profiles.
Just Press Command and Spacebar and search Terminal in Spotlight. Now, just write ssh [email protected] to connect to the server.
Moreover, it allows you to add bookmarks while working which can be then used to quickly maneuver through the extended Terminal window. The best part is, the inspector helps you to view and control the ongoing processes, and even lets you adjust the window titles and background colors.
Price: free
iTerm 2
iTerm is one of the best PuTTY alternatives for MacOS that comes loaded with features. It offers solutions for any desire that a terminal user could have thought of. Among its major attractions is the option to split a tab into several windows with each one of them featuring a different session. Whether you choose to divide it vertically or horizontally, it allows you to generate endless panes in any possible alignment.
By registering a hotkey, you can bring the software to the front when working from another program. Simply press a key and the terminal comes up. You can get a terminal that’s always available by setting the hotkey to open a dedicated pane. Moreover, it features powerful search functionality, while the interface stays distant. As soon as you input your search term, the matches are instantly highlighted.
Autocomplete is another feature where as you type the first letter of any word that you might have used earlier, followed with “Cmd” and the word comes up at the top of the list. Find option to look for text, paste history to recheck the last copied or pasted text, or instant replay to travel back in time, are some of its other significant features.
Price: free
ZOC
ZOC is compatible with both Windows and Mac making it universally usable. This terminal emulator is a freeware that offers a splendid list of emulations and robust features. These features make it a dependable and classy tool that links you to hosts and mainframe. It connects you through different modes such as telnet, secure shell, and more.
It boasts an advanced interface that features a tabbed session with thumbnails. It offers address book containing folders and hosts (color-coded). It can be easily customized to suit your choices and requirements. Support for a scripting language with 200 plus commands, huge number of loggings, buttons that are user-defined, or full keyboard remapping features are among some of the major features.
Price: free
vSSH Lite
If you are looking for a free PuTTY alternative to Mac OS, then vSSH Lite could be the right solution. It’s a modern SSH and Telnet client that’s highly customizable. It comes with an enlarged keyboard, touch screen motions, synchronization for iCloud, and more. It offers one of the fastest terminal outputs, comes with SSH and Telnet protocols, offers verification options with username/password and private keys, option to scroll through the touchscreen or use arrows, and multiple sessions.
Among its other major features are, background work for up to 3 minutes for iOS7, and up to 10 minutes for iOS 5/6, notifies on timeout, connections for iCloud/Dropbox, sharing of macros and keys, key and port forwarding options, and so on.
Price: free
Hyper
Hyper is another free and open source software for Mac that works as a strong alternative to PuTTY. It’s also compatible with other major platforms. The project intends to create a pleasant and extendable experience for those using a command-line interface developed on open web models.
The software aims to focus majorly on speed, consistency, and the creation of accurate API for extension creators. Overall, the program can be expanded with add-ons, but without any choice for file transfer or encryption.
Price: free and open source
Shuttle
Shuttle for Mac is an uncomplicated and straightforward shortcut menu application for OS X. All you need to do is to launch the app and select the option that says “Configure to edit ~/.shuttle.json”. Now, describe the items featured in the menu as well as the actions that start functioning when clicked.
Price: free
OpenSSH
A free and open source terminal emulator for Mac OS, OpenSSH is also available for other platforms. It’s a leading connectivity software used to log in from a remote system with the SSH client. It encodes the entire traffic to remove any possibilities of spying, hijacking connection, and other malware attacks. Besides, it also offers an extended range of safe tunneling features, multiple verification techniques, and elegant configuration choices.
The program comes equipped with tools like ssh, scp, and sftp for remote functions, ssh-add, ssh-keysign, ssh-keyscan, and ssh-keygen for key management, and sshd, sftp-server, and ssh-agent as service options.
Price: free
Royal TSX
If you are looking for a PuTTY alternative for Mac that offers easy and safe access to the remote computers, then Royal TSX can be your best bet. It helps you manage your computers remotely on several different platforms at a time. Whether you are a system engineer, IT professional, developer, or system admin, the tool is perfect for your needs.
It also offers assistance for credential management and comes with a tabbed interface for convenience. Simply mention the name of the credential to allocate a credential to connections. This helps you to share a file that features only connections with your personal testimonials saved in a confidential file, locked with a passcode.
It features a smooth and user interface that is completely customizable. Besides, it can manage files accessed by different users concurrently, while letting you integrate file modifications without an SQL database back-end. It can also sync with LastPass and KeePass that allows you to open the documents. It also allows the credentials to be opened to be used as the normal credentials for the software.
Price: free trial available; pro version starts from € 39.00
Chrome Secure Shell
For those looking for one of the best PuTTY alternatives for Mac, Chrome Secure Shell is the right choice It’s a terminal emulator and SSH client designed for Chrome. It’s compatible with x-term that uses the built-in client to connect to the SSH servers right away without needing any outer proxies.
Price: free
Termius
If you are looking for an extensive command-line option, Termius could be the best option for you. This tool is way beyond than just an SSH client as it reexplores remote access for network engineers and system admins. It allows you to access the Linux or IoT based devices safely, and fix any issues much faster and conveniently.
This free application offers an attractive, handmade interface for all major platforms. There are no ads for distraction. Moreover, it couples its servers and credentials for fast access. While it helps make groups to explain the shared themes and settings, it also tags your systems to keep them arranged.
It comes equipped with 10 colorful themes and fonts that can be adjusted. In addition, it allows you to create several connections to the same host or link to different hosts. You can also encode almost all services and connections using port forwarding and tunneling.
Price: free
Kitty Terminal
Kitty Terminal can be easily considered among the best PuTTY alternatives for Mac OS as it’s a robust, multi-platform, and a GPU-supported terminal emulator. The program transfers description to the GPU and makes the OpenGL to work for quick, multi-platform performance. It includes native tiling designs along with support for visual, Unicode, and ligature.
It provides support for every advanced terminal feature like the images, true-color, mouse protocol, and more. It also supports tiling of different terminal windows parallelly in multiple patterns and does not require using the tmux. Best of all, it can be managed from the shell prompt or the scripts. The program can be extended using Kittens structure that helps build small terminal programs.
In addition, it provides support for startup sessions that enable you to fix a design, active directories, and apps to launch at the startup. Besides, it also lets you launch the scrollback option in an individual window that uses random apps.
Price: free and open source
SecureCRT
SecureCRT offers a powerful terminal emulation function for those in the field of computers. While it helps to increase productivity with modern session control, it also sets up many methods to save time and streamline mundane tasks. It offers safe remote access, file transfer facility, and the option of data tunneling for all employees in the organization.
Moreover, it comes with pre-set color schemes, that includes Solarized scheme, making it easy to transform the look of your terminal workstation. You have the freedom to select from a different light and dark color mixups with matching forefront, background, and ANSI shades.
Price: free trial available; pro version starts at $59.95
Codinn SSH
Codinn SSH Proxy helps transform any remote server (SSH) to SOCKS v5 proxy, that’s responsive and user-friendly. It stores the history of your SSH credentials and private key passcode, and save it to the keychain of OS X. What’s more? It can even reconnect you automatically when your Mac wakes you up from your sleep.
Among its major features are, autostart option as the Mac OS X starts, option to share SOCKS v5 proxy on LAN, quick change between multiple SSH accounts create a whitelist, and more.
Price: On request
While there are many alternatives for PuTTY for Windows, not many options are there for Mac OS. However, the ones we have listed are good enough to suffice your needs. Given that Mac OS already comes equipped with its own native SSH client, chances are that you may not require external support. But, those who are looking for additional features, can try any of the apps listed in the above list of the best PuTTY alternative for Mac OS.
DTerm
DTerm is another great PuTTY alternative for MacOS which is context based. This command line works at the simple touch of a key. It syncs the command line process into the user’s regular workflow and improves productivity while removing any clutters from the screen. In short, it simplifies the entire workflow by eliminating the tedious process of functioning as an individual window in an individual application.
As you look for information, the software questions the window for the route to its logs (at the extreme front), while introducing a command line using a suitable active directory. It also lets the log files to be added to the command, easily. Moreover, it allows you to copy the command outcomes to the clipboard and release the software with a single stroke of a keyboard.
The software helps cut down the entire workflow of operating command in a random working directory and copying the outcomes to be used later. It reduces this entire process to as low as just three simple keystrokes.
Putty For Mac Homebrew Commands
I find passion in writing Tech articles around Windows PC and softwares
PuTTYgen is a tool used for generating public and private SSH keys which are its fundamental function. Though it collects keys in its own file format i.e. .ppk files, keys can also be transformed to any other file format quickly. It is available for the various operating system, i.e. Windows, Linux, Mac, etc. PuTTYgen.exe is the graphical tool on Windows OS. While on the other side, Linux OS has the only command-line version.
Contents
- 2 Download PuTTYgen
- 2.1 Download PuTTYgen on Windows
- 2.2 Download PuTTYgen for Mac
- 2.3 Download PuTTYgen for Linux
PuTTYgen is used to generate public or private key pair for creating SSH keys. Below is the complete guidance about how to generate RSA key in Windows operating system:
- Once you install the PuTTY on your machine, you can easily run PuTTYgen. For the same, go to Windows -> Start Menu -> All Programs -> PuTTY -> PuTTYgen.
- You will see the PuTTY key generator dialog box on your screen
- You will find a “Generate” button in that dialog. Clicking on it will lead to generating the keys for you.
- Now you will need to add a unique key passphrase in the Key passphrase and Confirm passphrase field.
- Click on the “Save Public Key” and “Save Private Key” buttons to save your public and private keys.
- You will see the text starting with ssh-RSA in the Public key for pasting into OpenSSH authorized_keys file field which is located at the top of the window. Copy that entire text to your clipboard by pressing ctrl+c as you will require the key to paste on your clipboard in the public key tool of control panel or directly on the cloud server.
Various Ways to Use RSA Key Pair
RSA key pair generated through PuTTYgen is used in two various ways defined as below:
- To assign while creating a new cloud server
You can choose the public key from the given list of keys at the time of creating cloud server. If you don’t find your key in that list, then first add and then assign it. - Assign to an existing cloud server
At the time of connecting to the cloud server, first of all, you need to tell PuTTY to use it for utilizing your newly created RSA key pair.
The installation of PuTTYgen is very simple as it is installed as a part of normal PuTTY .msi package installation. You can follow the simple steps to download PuTTYgen software for your system. That is the reason why you don’t need to download PuTTYgen separately. Once you download PuTTY software, you will be able to install and run PuTTYgen easily in no time. Below is the complete instruction about how to download and install PuTTY on Windows.
Download PuTTYgen on Windows
The very first requisite is to acquire the copy of PuTTY installation package. If your system is of 64-bit, then you should install a 64-bit version of PuTTY, i.e. putty-64bit-<version>-installer.msi. In case of a 32-bit operating system, you will need to install the 32-bit version of PuTTY, i.e. putty-<version>-installer.msi
Go to PuTTY Installation Download page, where you will find the download link of PuTTY installation package with the exhaustive details of its installation, setup instruction, verifying release signature, various alternatives, many more.
Once the PuTTY installation package is downloaded successfully, now it’s time to install it by starting the installer. Go to How to install PuTTY on Windows where you will find the step by step guidance for PuTTY installation for Windows operation system.
After successfully downloading and installing PuTTY on your Windows machine, you are just 2-3 clicks away to run PuTTYgen. Follow the below-given step by step guidance to run PuTTYgen:
Run PuTTYgen on Windows
1. Go to Windows -> Start Menu -> All Programs -> PuTTY -> PuTTYgen. You will see a window for PuTTY Key Generator on your screen.
That’s it. Now you can generate public or private key pair using PuTTYgen. puttygen
Download PuTTYgen for Mac
You can find the step by step guide to download PuTTYgen for Mac operating system. Command-line SSH client is a part of the Mac operating system. To utilize it, go to Finder and then opt for Go -> utilities from the top menu. After that find the terminal which supports SSH connections to remote servers.
Ported PuTTY for Mac
Mac has the port of PuTTY which can be installed in various ways described as below:
- Installation using Homebrew:
Use the below-given command to install PuTTY in case you have already installed “brew”command.sudo brew install putty - Installation using MacPorts:
PuTTY is easily available through MacPorts. First of all, install MacPorts and then apply the below-given command.
sudo port install puttyUse the below-given command to add the shortcut on the desktop.cp /opt/local/bin/putty ~/Desktop/PuTTY - Alternatives to PuTTY on Mac OSCyberduck, used by many people on Mac OS is the best SSH Client is the ultimate alternative to PuTTY on Mac OS.
Download PuTTYgen for Linux
In order to download PuTTYgen for Linux (Ubuntu) operating system, one required to install PuTTYgen separate from the PuTTY client in case of some Linux distributions.
For example, Debian Linux requires the below-given code to install PuTTYgen:
sudo aptitude install putty-tools
Generate Key Pair for Authentication in Linux
Use the below command to create the key pair for authentication in Linux.
PuTTYgen -t RSA -b 2048 -C “user@host” -o keyfile.ppk
Putty For Mac Homebrew Cleaner
Various Command Line Options of PuTTY in Linux
Below is the list of important command line options for PuTTY in Linux operating system.
PuTTYgen [-t keytype [-b bits] [-q] | keyfile]
[-C new-comment] [-P]
[-O output-type | -p | -l | -L]
[-o output-file]
Options:
- Keyfile – It is the name of the existing key file to read at the time of changing the current key.
- -t keytype – This command specifies the type of the key to creating. Its acceptable values are RSA and dsa.rsa1.
- -b bits – This command specifies a total number of bit in a particular key. 1024 is the perfect size for DSA key, while 2048 or 4096 are the perfect size for RSA keys.
- -q – This command suppresses the message about progress at the time of key generation.
- -C new-comment – This command is used to specify the comment to describe the key. It can be used for new and/or existing key. Key operation is not affected by comment. However, it is used to recognize the key owner, it’s not reliable completely as any value can be applied to it.
- –P – This command is used to update the passphrase of a key. Passphrase helps to encrypt the private key. As passphrase can’t be add or update on command line, it prompts a new passphrase tool to alter it.
- –old-passphrase-file – The old password of the key remains in this file. This is used when the key is protected by a passphrase.
- –new-passphrase file – This file entails the new passphrase of the key. This command comes in the action either at the time of generating new key or while applying –P command to change the passphrase.
- -O output-type – This command defines what to give in output. By default, the private key is the output.
Putty For Mac Brew
Thus, above are the prominent commands of PuTTYgen in Linux operating system. There are many other commands also available to perform a various task from the command prompt in Linux at flank speed.