WinSCP is the best
...and I use it every day. My life would be a weak substitute for life without it; I'd spend all day typing "ls" with perfect parameters and wandering through unhelpful man pages of scp.
But! Best can always get better. When my computer gets disconnected from the internet, PuTTY gracefully disconnects. And after ~30 seconds, it allows me to try to reconnect. WinSCP tends to crash in the background, or pop up some message box that you can't find because it's associated with one particular text editor instance and you have 20 open, and unless you click on that specific one, it's invisible. So I always have to kill it from the task manager if anything goes wrong, like my computer goes to sleep or I close my laptop.
WinSCP is the best. It's the kind of program that us Windows users go to 3rd parties for because Microsoft never does anything right, and if you do it too right they just steal it. Still, I would like to be able to close my laptop, open it again an hour later, and not have to spend a minute killing WinSCP instances in the task manager and logging back in with new OTP keys before I can get it to work again. I don't have to do that with Putty.
I'd also like to mention that I have to log in to WinSCP many times per day due to MFA. This is not the fault of WinSCP which expects a single password that will work all day; it is the fault of MFA implementations. But the end result is that I log in to WinSCP and I can browse files. If I want to copy a file, no, the password is wrong, I need to log in again with a new MFA key. If I want to change a file, no, the password is wrong, I need to login again with a new MFA key. After I have logged in, then logged in a second time to copy files, then logged in a third time to change files, the system seems to generally work until I get disconnected and need to repeat the process... except that the notifications that "Your transfer failed because you need to enter another password" are pop-under so I don't notice them until they time-out.
I spend a lot of time logging in to WinSCP connections. It would be great if there was some system whereby you could log in to a WinSCP connection to a remote computer and then you could just... do things. Without typing in 3 passwords to get full functionality. Once you establish a connection I don't understand why you need to keep typing in more passwords to do basic things like copy, edit, or rename a file that you can easily do in PuTTY with a single password entry.
But! Best can always get better. When my computer gets disconnected from the internet, PuTTY gracefully disconnects. And after ~30 seconds, it allows me to try to reconnect. WinSCP tends to crash in the background, or pop up some message box that you can't find because it's associated with one particular text editor instance and you have 20 open, and unless you click on that specific one, it's invisible. So I always have to kill it from the task manager if anything goes wrong, like my computer goes to sleep or I close my laptop.
WinSCP is the best. It's the kind of program that us Windows users go to 3rd parties for because Microsoft never does anything right, and if you do it too right they just steal it. Still, I would like to be able to close my laptop, open it again an hour later, and not have to spend a minute killing WinSCP instances in the task manager and logging back in with new OTP keys before I can get it to work again. I don't have to do that with Putty.
I'd also like to mention that I have to log in to WinSCP many times per day due to MFA. This is not the fault of WinSCP which expects a single password that will work all day; it is the fault of MFA implementations. But the end result is that I log in to WinSCP and I can browse files. If I want to copy a file, no, the password is wrong, I need to log in again with a new MFA key. If I want to change a file, no, the password is wrong, I need to login again with a new MFA key. After I have logged in, then logged in a second time to copy files, then logged in a third time to change files, the system seems to generally work until I get disconnected and need to repeat the process... except that the notifications that "Your transfer failed because you need to enter another password" are pop-under so I don't notice them until they time-out.
I spend a lot of time logging in to WinSCP connections. It would be great if there was some system whereby you could log in to a WinSCP connection to a remote computer and then you could just... do things. Without typing in 3 passwords to get full functionality. Once you establish a connection I don't understand why you need to keep typing in more passwords to do basic things like copy, edit, or rename a file that you can easily do in PuTTY with a single password entry.
