For some unfathomable (to me) reason, Windows doesn’t seem to ship with a SSH program out of the box. I’ve used the venerable Putty in the past, but it makes you do a lot of work for a simple SSH session.

I recently ran across an open-source replacement called Cmder for Windows. Based on ConEmu, it bills itself as a “portable console emulator for Windows”. I find it a great replacement for PuTTY, Console, and Powershell. Cmder has a huge number of benefits:

1. Cmder allows you to create a ssh session simply by typing ssh user@host — I’m immediately in love
2. Cmder is easy on the eyes, with attractive fonts, default Monokai color scheme, and resizable windows
3. If you get the “full” version, you get bash emulation with a Unix-y environment, including ls, grep, and even git
4. Cmder will run off a USB stick
5. … and it’s free (MIT License)

Check it out at http://cmder.net