Putty: programming merits compared to Microsoft mentality

Simon Tatham's terminal emulation program Putty (www.putty.org or http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/) is ubiquitously used around the world. It would be among the top emulators if there was a market share analysis as done to search engines. Below I summarize a few usability merit points in comparison with what Microsoft or its programmers habitually do.

* Smart copy, but not too smart. By default, double click highlights and copies a word within the word boundary, marked by spaces or certain punctuation marks. Microsoft Word would highlight a word plus its trailing spaces (if exist), which most likely you have to manually remove. More annoyingly, in Word, if you copy from the middle of a word, the starting point jumps to the beginning of the word for you, and if you copy a whole line, a carriage return is implicitly copied. Imagine that's a command you intend to paste to a terminal window but don't intend to run yet! Microsoft Skype for Business (formerly Lync, or Communicator) doesn't even offer easy copy, or gratuitously renders your plain text paste into tabular format.

* No modal window. A modal window is a popup window you have to close first before you can go to its parent window. If you open a Font window (pane) in Microsoft Word, you have to finish your "business" in this window before you can continue in the main window. In Putty, you open Change Settings and you can still at least copy text, although editing keystrokes are deferred. Making a window modal prevents too many popups from cluttering user space, but a modal window is also an annoyance to an experienced user.


In general, Microsoft products imagine a user's need by offering too much, which takes some effort to remove.

There's one annoyance shared by both Microsoft products and Putty: fixed size popup windows. I would love to see a popup window such as the Session menu or Font menu to be resizable in Putty. With tens of saved sessions, the Session scroll-down window, limited to show 7 saved entries, is hard to scroll through. Mark Russinovich obviously feels users' pain; his tools such as Process Explorer allows you to drag the corner of a window to resize it to whatever size you like.