WindTerm

A Quicker and better SSH/Telnet/Serial/Shell/Sftp client for DevOps.

Hello WindTerm 🌹, hello world!

We're just beginning! If you want a high performance text editor, you can try WindEdit.

License

Completely FREE for commercial and non-commercial use without limitations. All released source codes (except thirdparty directory) are provided under the terms of Apache-2.0 license.

Introduction

See Intro Videos

Download

Linux binary, MacOS binary and Windows binary: https://github.com/kingToolbox/WindTerm/releases

Source Code

WindTerm is a partial open source project, and the source will be gradually opened.

Open source code includes, but is not limited to, the classes that can be used independently, such as functional, algorithms, gui widgets, etc., as well as functional libraries, such as network, protocols, etc., as well as all types that require open source according to the license.

Issues and feature requests

Any issues and feature requests are welcome.

Please click issues to commit an issue or a feature request.

Please click Discussion to discuss anything about SSH, SFtp, Shell(Linux shell, Windows cmd and powershell), Telnet, Serial and WindTerm.

Screenshots

Main Window (zsh):

Split views:

DigeWhite Theme:

Features

SSH, Telnet, Tcp, Shell, Serial

• SSH v2, Telnet, Raw Tcp, Serial, Shell protocols implemented. Intro Video
• Supports SSH auto execution when session authenticated.
• Supports SSH ControlMaster.
• Supports SSH ProxyCommand or ProxyJump. Intro Video
• Supports SSH agent. Intro Video
• Supports SSH auto login with password, public-key, keyboard-interactive, gssapi-with-mic. Intro Video
• Supports X11 forwarding. Intro Video
• Supports direct/local port forwarding, reverse/remote port forwarding and dynamic port forwarding. Intro Video
• Supports XModem, YModem and ZModem. Intro Video
• Integrated sftp, scp client, supports download, upload, remove, rename, make new file/directory and so on. Intro Video
• Integrated local file manager, supports move to, copy to, copy from, remove, rename, make new file/directory and so on.
• Supports Windows Cmd, PowerShell and Cmd, PowerShell as administrator.
• Supports Linux bash, zsh, powershell core and so on.
• Supports MacOS bash, zsh, powershell core and so on.

GUI

• Supports Windows, MacOS and Linux.
• Supports Multilingual User Interface.
• Supports Unicode 13.
• Session dialog and session tree. Intro Video
• Auto Completion. Intro Video
• Free Type Mode. Intro Video
• Focus Mode. Intro Video
• Sync Input. Intro Video
• Enhanced protection of the session username and password. Intro Video
• Command palette. Intro Video
• Command sender. Intro Video
• Explorer Pane. Intro Video
• Shell Pane.
• Quick Bar. Intro Video
• Paste Dialog. Intro Video
• Local and remote modes with vim keybindings. (Using Shift+Enter key to switch between remote and local mode) Intro Video
• Supports time stamp, folding, outlining, split views.
• Supports powerline in Linux and PowerShell, e.g. Oh-My-Zsh, Oh-My-Posh. Intro Image
• Supports color schemes like vscode. Intro Video
• Supports searching and previewing. Intro Video
• Supports highlighting the opening and closing delimiter, such as (), [], {} and the customed delimiters. Intro Video
• Supports changing the UI theme. Intro Video
• Supports setting the tab color. Intro Video
• Supports searching over the opened tabs. Intro Video
• Supports closing tabs to the right.
• Supports setting the windows transparency. Intro video
• Supports select-to-copy, right-click-to-paste or middle-click-to-paste.
• Supports searching text online with Google, Bing, Github, Stackoverflow, Wikipedia and DuckDuckGo. Intro video
• Supports hiding mouse cursor while typing.
• Supports locking screen. Intro video

Term

• Supports vt100, vt220, vt340, vt420, vt520, xterm, xterm-256-colors.
• Supports unicode, emojis, true-color, mouse protocol, etc.
• Supports auto wrap mode. Intro Video
• Protocols and terms can be customed.
• All vttest tests have passed except Tektronix 4014.

Session

• Supports HTTP and SOCKS5 proxy. Intro Video
• Supports Jump Server proxy. Intro Video
• Supports manual and automated session logging. Intro Video
• Rename and duplicate session. Intro Video
• Restore last sessions and layouts when restart. Intro Video
• Supports opening a specific session or set of sessions on startup.

Performance

• Dynamic memory compression, typically 20% to 90% of the working memory load can be reduced.
• High performance, low memory, low latency. Intro Video

Sftp Performance

The hardware used for generating the data in these benchmarks was

windows 10 - 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 and 8GB memory.

WindTerm1.72, WindTerm 1.2, FileZilla 3.48.1, WinSCP 5.17.2 (Build 10278) tests are performed on WSL(Ubuntu 18.04.2).

The version of clients:

Application	Version	Release Date
windterm	v1.72	2020-10-25
windterm	v1.2	2020-06-15
FileZilla	v3.48.1	2020-05-19
WinScp	v5.17.2 (Build 10278)	2020-03-09

All test data is for reference only.

5GB huge file (5,154,830 KB), generated by random data

	Download Time	Download Rate	Upload Time	Upload Rate
WindTerm 1.72 (Use high speed transfer)	23s	216.3 MB/s	20s	247.0 MB/s
WindTerm 1.72	23s	214.7 MB/s	20s	244.0 MB/s
WindTerm 1.2	37s	139.3 MB/s	43s	119.9 MB/s
FileZilla	32s	161.1 MB/s	30s	171.8 MB/s
WinSCP	81s	63.7 MB/s	91s	56.7 MB/s

4400 files, 16 folders (107,042 KB), unzipped from vim-7.4.1049.zip

	Download Time	Download Rate	Upload Time	Upload Rate
WindTerm 1.7	26s	3.9 MB/s	13s	8.1 MB/s
WindTerm 1.2	32s	3.4 MB/s	10s	10.7 MB/s
FileZilla	48s	2.2 MB/s	35s	3.1 MB/s
WinSCP	42s	2.6 MB/s	12s	8.9 MB/s

Terminal Performance

The hardware used for generating the data in these benchmarks was

windows 10 - 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 and 8GB memory.
MacOs 10.13 - 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 and 8GB memory.

WindTerm 1.72, rxvt, putty, xterm, Windows Terminal tests are performed on WSL(Ubuntu 18.04.2).

Iterm2, kitty, Alacritty tests are performed on MacOS shell,

For WindTerm: No color scheme used in windterm. Color scheme will result in approximately 2% loss and more memory usage.

For Alacritty: Only supports up to 100,000 scrollback lines, so every test use "history: 100000" setting and no memory usage measured.

For Windows Terminal: Only supports up to 65,535 scrollback lines, so every test use "historySize: 65535" setting and no memory usage measured. 

The version of terminals:

Application	Version	Release Date
windterm	v1.72	2020-10-25
rxvt-unicode	v9.2.2	2016-05-14
putty	v0.71	2019-03-16
xterm	v3.30	2017-06-20
iterm2	v3.3.6	2019-10-09
alacritty	v0.5.0	2020-07-21
kitty	v0.14.6	2019-09-25
Windows Terminal	v1.3.2651.0	2020-09-22

All test data is for reference only.

Test Command: "cat ./benchmark_randomdata"

The benchmark_randomdata contains 97.6MB random text (102,401,504 bytes, 1,329,878 lines, generated and tested by random_test.sh)

In all cases, three runs were made to warm system caches. The reported numbers are the median of five runs.

1. Telnet:

	Lines of scrollback	Data Rate(MB/sec)	Memory Usage(MB)
WindTerm	unlimited	52.1	106.6
rxvt	1,350,000	37.8	842.2
Putty	1,350,000	4.9	733.4
xterm	1,350,000	2.2	3328.4
Windows Terminal + telnet.exe	65,535	0.1	Not measured, use 65,535 scrollback lines setting

2. SSH:

	Lines of scrollback	Data Rate(MB/sec)	Memory Usage(MB)
WindTerm	unlimited	41.8	108.5
rxvt	1,350,000	40.2	842.2
Putty	1,350,000	4.8	734.9
xterm	1,350,000	2.3	3328.4
Windows Terminal + ssh.exe	65,535	2.1	Not measured, use 65,535 scrollback lines setting

3. Shell:

	Lines of scrollback	Data Rate(MB/sec)	Memory Usage(MB)
iterm2	unlimited	- (Take too long time)	more than 1300
kitty	unlimited	17.2	2655
Alacritty	100,000	41.3	-

Test command: "time seq 1 n" (n = [1000000, 2000000, 5000000, 10000000], scrollback lines: unlimited)

n = 1,000,000

	Time(sec)	Memory Usage(MB)
WindTerm	1.236	16.1
rxvt	5.082	633.3
putty	4.161	551.1
xterm	40.421	2500.7
iterm2	2.116	146.3
Kitty	2.535	2376.5
Alacritty	1.162	Not measured, use 100,000 scrollback lines setting
Windows Terminal + ssh.exe	23.246	Not measured, use 65,535 scrollback lines setting

n = 2,000,000

	Time(sec)	Memory Usage(MB)
WindTerm	2.287	24.1
rxvt	10.896	1266.6
putty	16.045	1102.6
xterm	68.154	5005.5
iterm2	4.181	383.2
Kitty	5.620	4749.9
Alacritty	2.322	Not measured, use 100,000 scrollback lines setting
Windows Terminal + ssh.exe	50.381	Not measured, use 65,535 scrollback lines setting

n = 5,000,000

	Time(sec)	Memory Usage(MB)
WindTerm	5.520	68.2
rxvt	27.533	3166.2
putty	45.911	2757.1
xterm	-	Out of memory
iterm2	10.805	1048.3
Kitty	-	Out of memory
Alacritty	5.799	Not measured, use 100,000 scrollback lines setting
Windows Terminal + ssh.exe	130.371	Not measured, use 65,535 scrollback lines setting

n = 10,000,000

	Time(sec)	Memory Usage(MB)
WindTerm	10.674	133.3
rxvt	-	Out of memory
putty	-	Out of memory
xterm	-	Out of memory
iterm2	20.468	2231.3
Kitty	-	Out of memory
Alacritty	11.598	Not measured, use 100,000 scrollback lines setting
Windows Terminal + ssh.exe	264.739	Not measured, use 65,535 scrollback lines setting

n = 10,000,000 scrollback = 30 Lines

	Time(sec)	Memory Usage(MB)
WindTerm	10.167	0.7
rxvt	9.687	0.1
putty	95.382	0.4
xterm	286.510	0.1
iterm2	25.448	7.4
Kitty	16.104	0.5
Alacritty	11.798	Not measured, use zero scrollback lines setting
Windows Terminal + ssh.exe	261.096	Not measured, use zero scrollback lines setting

Linux Terminal Performance

The hardware used for generating the data in these benchmarks was

Debian 10 Vm - 4cpu and 4GB memory.

For WindTerm: No color scheme used in windterm. Color scheme will result in approximately 2% loss and more memory usage.

For other terminals: No memory usage measured because most of them write the history to disk or only support a limited number of lines in memory..

The version of terminals:

Application	Version	Release Date
Windterm	v1.9	2020-12-22
Gnome	v3.30.2	2018-10-22
Mate Terminal	v1.20.2	2019-02-11
Konsole	v18.04.0	2019-04-12
Xfce4 Terminal	v0.8.7.4	2018-5-15
QTerminal	v0.14.1	2019-01-26

All test data is for reference only.

Test Command: "cat ./benchmark_randomdata"

The benchmark_randomdata contains 97.6MB random text (102,401,504 bytes, 1,329,878 lines, generated and tested by random_test.sh)

In all cases, three runs were made to warm system caches. The reported numbers are the median of five runs.

	Cost Time
WindTerm	1.976s
Gnome Terminal	9.781s
Mate Terminal	9.841s
Konsole	25.050s
xfce4 Terminal	10.520s
QTerminal	20.763s

Test command: "time seq 1 n" (n = [1000000, 2000000, 5000000, 10000000], scrollback lines: unlimited)

n	1,000,000	2,000,000	5,000,000	10,000,000	10,000,000 (scrollback lines: 100)
WindTerm	0.846s (18.6MB)	1.574s (26.6MB)	4.046s (56.4MB)	8.232s (102.2MB)	7.748s (3.4MB)
Gnome Terminal	0.920s	2.152s	5.271s	11.111s	13.109s
Mate Terminal	0.822s	1.698s	5.943s	10.920s	12.290s
Konsole	1.612s	3.199s	8.157s	16.029s	15.650s
xfce4 Terminal	0.870s	2.160s	5.866s	12.089s	13.304s
QTerminal	9.272s	18.391s	45.999s	104.277s	17.208s

Latency

Considering the network influence on the latency, the following data is from WindEdit. DIGEdit is the text component of WindTerm.

	Min	Max	Avg	SD
WindEdit	1.9	7.6	2.9	0.8
Windows Notepad	0.9	16.5	7.8	1.8
GVim	0.9	10.4	2.8	1.2

Shortcuts

Shortcut Keys List

Roadmap

Release cycle:

4-8 weeks.

Prerelease cycle:

1~2 weeks

Roadmap of v2.6 (Late-August, for reference only)

• Resolve issues as much as possible
• Improved Filer
• Improved Transfer
• Improved Quickbar
• SSH Agent Forwaring
• New memory allocator and manager and garbage collector (Postponed to a later version )
• Command Snippet Description (Postponed to a later version )
• SSH GSSAPI Authentication (Postponed to a later version )
• SSH Agent (Postponed to a later version )
• Search in sessions (Postponed to a later version )

Download: WindTerm 2.5.0 (2022-7-24)

Roadmap of version 2.x:

• External tools
• Protocols:
  • Mosh
  • Rlogin
• Session:
  • Auto Complete
  • Chat mode
  • Log viewer
• File transfer:
  • ftp, ftps
• Script, macro and plugin stystem
• More ...

Release Schedule:

Version	Level	Target	Status	Timeline
v0.x	Basic	Basic framework and basic features, but complete a high-performance text editor (WindEdit) as the base, and be able to use them normally.	Finished	Long long ago ~ Sprint of 2020
v1.x	Manual	Perfect features and can be used by most developers in their daily work	Finished	Spring of 2020 ~ Winter of 2020
v2.x	Semi automatic	Through triggers, macros, events, notifications and so on, developers can be assisted to complete some operations.	Developing	Spring of 2021 ~ Summer of 2022
v3.x	Fully automatic	Through plugins, scripts, machine learning and so on, automatically operating with achieving non-attended	Planning	Summer of 2022 ~ Winter of 2023

Acknowledgement

	Contribution
EvoWebFrance	French translation
kvnklk	German translation
Lemonawa	Simplified Chinese translation
LuxNegra	French translation
MosamXu	Simplified Chinese translation