Open-source SSH terminal client for Windows with tabs, private key auth + more

Question

Moving here a question locked on ServerFault, with some refinements:

• since nothing assures you that closed-source terminal emulators don't phone home with your login details or private keys, I'm looking for an open-source SSH client
• tabbed sessions are a must - PuTTY doesn't have them
• built-in file transfer from the remote server to my local machine (ZMODEM or SFTP). Use case: I want to transfer a particular remote file to my Windows as quickly as possible. SecureCRT, XShell, ZOC support ZMODEM, and I can do sz myfile. This disqualifies PuTTY because I'm not going to type the full pscp command every time I need to fetch a file.

Wikipedia has a comparison of SSH clients. Other desired features:

• configurable keyboard shortcuts
• configurable colors, or at least a light theme

The best candidate I found so far is MobaXTerm (sources - though it's not clear just how open sourced it is), which is ridiculously good (X11 forwarding to export the remote display from the server onto your Windows machine!) but really odd in a few respects:

• there's almost no community around it. No GitHub/SourceForge, no forum, no issue tracking
• it's bloated with all sorts of pointless tools, like a text-mode lobotomized Wireshark to capture network traffic, a calculator (yes, the one that comes with Windows is not good), a text-mode list of hardware devices in Windows (?!), a directories diff tool (are they seriously trying to come up with something better than, say, BeyondCompare?) or Cygwin and a bunch of other commands to soup up the Windows terminal

Disqualified:

• mRemoteNG - open source, but no private key authentication support. Seems to simply embed PuTTY.

Answer 1

As you've already mentioned PuTTY, I may recommend you one thing I'm using at work: MTPuTTY. It's a native Windows wrapper around PuTTY, which basically adds the "tabbed" feature you're after. It integrates PuTTY, so you have all your stored sessions available. You can attach already running single-windowed PuTTY sessions, or detach a tab to become such. Another Plus is: it is available as portable app, so no installation required.

But while MTPuTTY comes free-of-charge, it's unfortunately not open-source. On the other hand, it's PuTTY dealing with the sessions, and MTPuTTY just caters the "window collection and organization", so this might still be fitting for you.

^{MTPuTTY with multiple tabs open, one even with split-view (click image for larger variant)}

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If open-source is a strong requirement for you, also take a look at superputty, which offers a similar feature-set as MTPuTTY does (I've used this before switching to MTPuTTY, as I couldn't get it working with the portable PuTTY version). It also supports KiTTY, but a minor draw-back might be its dependency on .NET 2.0 or higher.

^{superputty: multiple open tabs / file transfer (click images for larger variants)}

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As pointed out in the comments, you might wish to use this in conjunction with KITTY instead of PuTTY. KITTY is a PuTTY fork, and offers a.o. experimental ZModem-Support.

As for your "configurable colors": That again can be done with the PuTTY/KITTY settings. On my setup, I use e.g. red background to identify production servers (as "red" signifies "danger", so I take extra care when typing in those tabs ;)) With KiTTY, you can even use background images.

I have not (yet) used KiTTY myself, but at least one colleague of mine swears on it (he also used PuTTY before).