PuTTY on Mac OS Catalina

The primary way is to customize one of the Terminal Profiles so it has all the terminal emulator features you desire. Then Duplicate the profile.

Terminal -> Preferences -> Profiles

Give the duplicated Profile a unique name (maybe something that sorts to the top of the list; numbers and underscores then to sort at the top of the list; it will be useful later 😀).

I named my example Profile "ssh lnx.sys.adr"

Select your new Profile, and in the 'Shell' tab, you can specify the "Run command". Put whatever ssh command and all the ssh options you desire. I just tossed in the -Y (create X11 tunnel) as an example, but if you want you can include -L tunnel options. -J jump hosts, -o options from "man ssh_config", etc...

Now when you want to start an ssh session, you can use Terminal -> Shell -> New Window Or New Tab and select your new Profile

I did Red-out personal information from my screenshot. Just select the ssh lnx.sys.adr Profile and, Terminal will create a new Window, and ssh to lnx.sys.adr

As I said, Profiles are my preferred way to bookmark ssh connections. But here are some other ways to have ssh bookmarks. Some a little weird 🙄

• Terminal Command-Shift-K
• Terminal -> Shell -> New Remote Connection
• open ssh://username@lnx.sys.adr # can be in a script, or a shell alias
• Open TextEdit. enter ssh://username@lnx.sys.adr . use cursor to select the text. Drag the selected text to the desktop. A mumble.inetloc file will be created. You can double-click this file to open a new Terminal window and ssh to the specified remote system.
• Create a Safari bookmark ssh://username@lnx.sys.adr
• Create $HOME/.ssh/config entries with all the ssh connection information and options associated with an alias (eg. fred) so all you need to type is ssh fred. Google can find tons of .ssh/config examples. Note: You can use .ssh/config entries in any of your above ssh bookmark methods. Especially for things like the .inetloc or Safari bookmarks to get additonal options specified for the connection. You would use ssh://fred and the .ssh/config would provide all the command line options.

I will also mention Terminal -> Preferences -> Window Groups (tab). You can setup your Terminal environment using all the profiles you created to create the Terminal windows and tab that you plan to use anytime you launch Terminal. Then using

Terminal -> Window (menu) -> Save Windows as Group...

You can either use the Terminal -> Window -> Open Window Group menu or when you are saving the Window group you can specify that Terminal should open those windows using the Profiles they were created with, including running your ssh commands. So you can quit Terminal, and the next time you launch Terminal it will open all your Terminal windows, and make all your ssh connections. NOTE: It will make the ssh connections as specified in the Profile used to create the window or tab. It will not restore ssh connections started from the command line.

iTerm2 has a similar Profile setup that you could use for bookmarking ssh connections. And they have "Window Arrangements" which are basically the same a "Window Groups" and behave the same way.

There are no precompiled PuTTY executables on the PuTTY download site for macOS Intel, or Apple Silicon. All that are available are strictly for Windows (Intel or arm). Although there is a UNIX tarball there for download, it is not compiled and it is out of scope for these communities to help you meet any source code dependencies, compilation, or debugging that may be involved.

If you have the command-line tools for Xcode installed, and a working homebrew package manager, then you can install and build a PuTTY client for macOS from brew install putty.

There may or may not be a GUI on the precompiled Windows executables, and unknown, and very unlikely there is compatible, GUI support in that UNIX tarball source code. Whether the latter is a suite of tools, or one tool is not something I know for a fact, as I have zero history with PuTTy.

What is it about PuTTY that Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal (aka macOS Terminal) does not satisfy?

or iTerm2 <https://iterm2.com>, another excellent macOS terminal emulator.

I can give you about 7 or 8 ways to bookmark ssh connections if that is what you are missing. The primary way on macOS Terminal is to duplicate a profile, give it a unique name, and then fill in the "Run Command" with your ssh command.

If there is some other PuTTY feature you desire, I'm sure it can be obtained using macOS Terminal or iTerm2

ssh-keygen keys I mostly manage the same as on a Unix system. I create my ssh-keygen key, then use

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa  user@1st.remote.host

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa  user@2nd.remote.host

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa  user@3rd.remote.host

etc...

to copy my keys to the remote system.

If you want to store your ssh-keygen passphrase in the macOS Keychain, you would use something like the following:

ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/id_rsa     # add your passphrase to your macOS Keychain

touch ~/.ssh/config

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config

edit ~/.ssh/config and add the following:

Host *

    AddKeysToAgent yes

    UseKeychain yes

    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

You can remove your ssh-keygen key from your Keychain using:

ssh-add -K -d ~/.ssh/id_rsa     # remove your passphrase from your macOS Keychain

I forgot that PuTTY manages the creation of the ssh-keygen key. On the Mac or any Unix system you would use the ssh-keygen command:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

  # Enter file in which to save the key (.../.ssh/id_rsa):<accept default; just hit enter>

  # Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): <any phrase you want - just make sure you remember it>

  # Enter same passphrase again:                <repeat the phrase>

NOTE: If you want password-less ssh-keygen keys, then for "Enter passphrase" and "Enter same passphrase again" you just press the return key, and the ssh-keygen key created will not ask for a passphrase. However, since macOS can store you passphrase in the macOS Keychain, it is painless to have a passphrase, assuming you basically just do interactive ssh connections from your interactive macOS login.