Terminal36T: SSH, SFTP, telnet and serial client for Windows

Terminal36T is a free product built in-house by Innovation36T. Its page describes it as having "PuTTY's settings depth and its habit of never guessing — with a modern interface, a real session inventory, and file transfer on the connection you already have open."

At a glance#

What you get#

• SSH, telnet, serial and local shells. SSH-2 with full PTY support, telnet, raw sockets, serial consoles, and local cmd, PowerShell, WSL and Git Bash tabs in the same window.
• Every way of logging in:
  • passwords and private keys
  • Pageant and the Windows OpenSSH agent
  • keyboard-interactive
  • OpenSSH certificates and FIDO2 security keys
  • OpenSSH and PuTTY .ppk keys are recognised by content, so a renamed key still works
• Built-in SFTP. A dual-pane file browser on the session that is already connected, with no second login. Drag files either way, with a transfer queue, and interrupted transfers resume where they stopped.
• Session inventory that inherits. Nested groups pass settings down the tree. For example, a group of production machines can share one cipher list, one keepalive and a red tab colour. It imports from ~/.ssh/config and from PuTTY.
• 94 settings, all of them real. PuTTY's full category tree with a search box, and a badge on every value showing where it came from (default, global, group or host). Click the badge to reset it.
• Host keys checked properly. The fingerprint is shown before any password prompt, and a changed key gets a deliberately different dialog. Saved credentials live in an AES-256-GCM vault behind Argon2id.
• Tunnels and jump hosts:
  • local, remote and dynamic SOCKS5 forwarding
  • SOCKS and HTTP proxies
  • X11 forwarding
  • jump-host chains where each hop is tunnelled, so the target's key is verified on your machine and no bastion holds its credentials
• Split panes and broadcast. Tile any number of sessions. Broadcast sends typing to every tile, says so loudly while it is on, and switches itself off when you leave the split.
• Snippets, logging and replay. Saved commands with {placeholders}, transcript logging, and recording with timing for playback.

How to use it#

1. Install it. Run Terminal36T_0.1.0_x64-setup.exe.
   • It installs for your user account only, so it never asks for an administrator password.
   • If Microsoft Edge WebView2 is missing, the installer fetches and installs it silently.
2. Connect to something.
   • Type user@host into the box at the top and press Enter. Put a port after a colon, e.g. root@10.0.0.5:2222.
   • To save a host, use Sessions → New session.
   • To import hosts, use Sessions → ⋯ → Import ~/.ssh/config or Import PuTTY sessions. Both are safe to run twice; hosts already known are skipped.
3. Check the fingerprint. On a first connection the server's fingerprint is shown before anything asks for a password.
   • "Accept and remember" writes it to %USERPROFILE%\.ssh\known_hosts.
   • If the key ever changes, the dialog comes back in red.
4. Choose how you log in. Password, key file (OpenSSH or .ppk), agent, or keyboard-interactive, set in the host dialog.
   • Pageant and the Windows OpenSSH agent are found automatically.
   • Security keys work through an agent: load the credential with ssh-add or Pageant, then set the host to Agent.
5. Move files. Files in the sidebar opens the dual-pane SFTP browser. Transfers queue, show progress and resume.
6. Make it yours. The gear icon opens the settings tree.
   • Settings apply at the level you opened them from: the gear for global defaults, or right-click a group or host.
   • Every value shows its source, and one click resets it to inherit.

"Windows protected your PC"#

This message is expected. Windows shows it for any installer that has not been signed with a paid code-signing certificate; it says nothing about what the file does. Click More info, then Run anyway. A signing certificate is on its way, and the notice will go with it.

To verify the download first: the SHA-256 of Terminal36T_0.1.0_x64-setup.exe is
70daf5ddf93b24c4861412c6049277688522a15cbba539fa4609ae37635ca1be.
Check it in PowerShell with:
Get-FileHash .\Terminal36T_0.1.0_x64-setup.exe -Algorithm SHA256

When a new version is released, the version number, download links and checksum on https://i36t.com/terminal/ replace the ones above.