PuTTY development began late in 1998, and was a usable SSH-2 client by October 2000. PuTTY does not support session tabs directly, but many wrappers are available that do. PuTTY comes bundled with command-line SCP and SFTP clients, called 'pscp' and 'psftp' respectively, and plink, a command-line connection tool, used for non-interactive sessions.

It can also be used with local serial port connections. The network communication layer supports IPv6, and the SSH protocol supports the delayed compression scheme. It also can emulate control sequences from xterm, VT220, VT102 or ECMA-48 terminal emulation, and allows local, remote, or dynamic port forwarding with SSH (including X11 forwarding). PuTTY supports SSO through GSSAPI, including user provided GSSAPI DLLs. PuTTY uses its own format of key files – PPK (protected by Message Authentication Code).

PuTTY supports many variations on the secure remote terminal, and provides user control over the SSH encryption key and protocol version, alternate ciphers such as AES, 3DES, RC4, Blowfish, DES, and Public-key authentication.

Putty terminal emulator for mac