Poderosa: The Terminal Emulator

The terminal is an important aspect of Cygwin like for any Unix-based OS. For this reason, you might see its users like me chasing after fancy ways of beautifying it. Well, I will try to make this the last time.

Poderosa is the best terminal emulator for Cygwin that I have come across. It has a tabbed GUI, much like the PuTTY Connection Manager. However, in addition to the network communication protocols through which one can connect to a remote system using PuTTY, local Cygwin shells can also be opened using Poderosa. I use it mainly for the latter purpose.

Poderosa allows the user to set custom fonts and colors, keyboard shortcuts, command suggestions, etc. The “detailed preference editor” is especially useful, though not very straightforward to use. The app was built in a plug-in architecture and allows one to build custom plug-ins.

Poderosa too needs .NET Framework 2.0 preinstalled on your computer. Unlike PuTTY Connection Manager, I found Poderosa very stable. For telnet though, Poderosa gave me trouble where the PuTTY Connection Manager worked.

Poderosa, according to the website, had funding from the Japanese Govt. during 2005. Presently, its development seems to have stopped over a couple of years ago. The last release was v4.1.0 and you can get it from here.

Image Source: Poderosa on my PC.