PuTTY wish port-mac

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summary: Port to Mac OS X
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.
depends: remove-statics port-unix-gtk3
priority: medium: This should be fixed one day.

There is a port of PuTTY and pterm to Mac OS X in progress, by means of compiling the GTK front end against the OS X Quartz version of GTK 3.

Its state, as of 2016-03-25, is that it's just about usable in a development context (SGT can just about use the pterm app in place of OS X's standard Terminal.app) but has far too many bugs and missing features to call a finished product yet. So for the moment you can build it from source if you check out the PuTTY repository, but it's not distributed in binary form.

(In 2005 there was an attempt to write a native OS X port, directly using the Cocoa API, but that ran into problems and was never finished. The GTK version will look less perfectly Mac-native, but has a greater chance of getting somewhere, and also the ongoing maintenance advantage that it can automatically inherit bug fixes and features with the ordinary Unix GTK code.)

Possibly useful links:

gtkapp.c, the main source file for the OS X application version of PuTTY/pterm. There's a large comment at the top containing the list of things that still need to be done, and another comment explaining how to build it.
the FAQ entry

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Audit trail for this wish.

(last revision of this bug record was at 2016-12-20 17:30:51 +0000)