MobaXterm surprisingly powerful

You may have noticed there aren't too many Windows developers out there.  Why is that?

It's probably because unless you're developing a .NET or Silverlight application, it's a royal pain to set up all the useful tools needed for developing:

  • Remote Desktop Connection
  • PuTTY
  • SSH
  • Mosh
  • SFTP client
  • Git
  • dig
Fortunately, the free tool MobaXterm combines all that functionality into a nice, concise, portable package.  Check it out!

Setup tips:

Make sure to include the following plugins: Curl, DnsUtils, Screen, tmux, X11Fonts, Zip

Also, include the nano plugin  (credit)

In addition, use this git plugin since it contains additional optional configs, such as subtree and stree.

If you need only Node.js you can install the official plugin.  However, if you need Node.js and npm, use this plugin.

Right-click http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem and save as "ca-bundle.crt" in the MobaXterm directory.  Then open MobaXterm and run git config --global http.sslcainfo ~/PATH/TO/MobaXterm/ca-bundle.crt

Create a Windows environment variable named CURL_CA_BUNDLE and set the value to C:\PATH\TO\MobaXterm\ca-bundle.crt (log out and back into Windows to apply)

In the MobaXterm Settings > Keyboard shortcuts menu, change keyboard shortcut for switching tabs to use Ctrl+Shift+LEFT / RIGHT arrows  (the default right/left arrows setting will change screen orientation instead on some laptops)

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P.S. My only complaint with MobaXterm is that it doesn't change the solid cursor block to an empty outline block when the application loses focus.  This is a handy visual cue in PuTTY that reminds me to click on the screen before typing, if needed.

P.P.S. CashBabun and cmder also look promising

P.P.P.S. Check out this nice post by Jeff Geerling that covers many pitfalls of Windows development


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