Skip to content

Command line access via ssh

There are two ways to gain command line access to supercomputers through ssh:

  • Use terminal software with built-in ssh support

  • Use regular terminal software that gives you a shell on Windows (PowerShell, CygWin shell or a Windows Subsystem for Linux shell, see also the section on creating a linux-like environment on Windows) with a linux-style SSH client. Recent versions of Windows bundle a native Windows implementation of the OpenSSH client that can be run from PowerShell or any other shell that supports running native Windows applications.

Terminal emulation with built-in SSH support

  • PuTTY has long been the most popular terminal emulation package of this type. The package is showing its age though and isn't really developed anymore except for security updates. It also comes with some tools for file transfer over sftp, but there is much better software for that purpose. The package is free though.\ PuTTY has seen several forks into packages that extend PuTTY in one way or another. The best known one is probably KiTTY, with many tiny improvements, including the option to follow hyperlinks from the terminal.

  • Bitvise SSH client is another SSH client that has some popularity. It also includes support for sftp.

  • However, this list and the next one on terminal emulators are far from complete. There are several other commercial and free options.

Terminal emulation without SSH support

Windows supports several environments with OpenSSH clients: its own PowerShell that can use a Windows native OpenSSH implementation included in recent versions of Windows 10, CygWin, and Linux-distributions running in WSL 1 or WSL 2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

To work comfortable, you'll still need a proper terminal emulation program as the ancient console window provided by Windows really isn't full-featured and doesn't benefit from features introduced in Windows 10 1809 (the ConPTY API).

Some terminal emulators for Windows are:

  • Windows Terminal: This is Microsoft's own terminal program and is 100% free. It can be found in the Windows Store, and is in fact the standard terminal for PowerShell on Windows 11. Initial versions were tricky to customize, requiring editing a json file, but from April 2020 on the program should also have a GUI for changing most settings. It makes full use of the improved support in Windows itself for UNIX-style terminals from May 2019 on. While it was initially very rough around the edges, with those improvements it is probably the terminal emulator to go for to have access to any shell on your Windows system and make ssh connections from there. In fact, using the built-in OpenSSH client from Windows it is even possible to open sessions directly on your favourite cluster by using ssh as the command to start a session.

  • ConEmu: A long-time popular terminal, though at this writing (early 2021) it doesn't seem as easy to use with WSL as the Windows Terminal (which will detect your WSL distributions automatically).