Update: I wrote this in 2009! That was forty Internet years ago. I’m leaving this article here in an archival state. But please, use Homebrew to install PuTTY. You don’t have to read the rest of this post. Simply open Terminal, paste this command:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)

Then type:

brew install putty

And that’s it, PuTTY will be installed on your machine. Easy. That is, if you are running the newest version of OS X, which you certainly should be.

If you have any questions at all, please leave a comment below or use the contact form above. I do answer your emails if they are interesting enough!

Some people are very used to PuTTY and they miss it when they are on a Mac. Is there a version for OS X? No, so this post is for those people. This really isn’t an install per se, it’s actually called a port. PuTTY doesn’t work “naturally” on OS X, so you need to use MacPorts to ‘port’ it to your Mac. When utilizing MacPorts, you can find that there are thousands of programs you can run on your Mac that normally wouldn’t be available. The interfaces may feel or act a bit differently, but it’s better than not having them at all.

Here are the steps to get it geared up:

1) Install MacPorts – Download/instructions for MacPorts (Be sure to pick the correct file for your OS X version.) Read More