Software update: PuTTY 0.79

Version 0.79 of PuTTY has become available. PuTTY is one of the most popular telnet and ssh clients, which makes it possible to remotely manage a computer over a secure connection. Originally the program was only available for Windows, but nowadays there are also clients for the various Unix platforms. Due to an issue, Windows users are recommended to uninstall the old version first. The changelog for this release can be found below.

Changes in version 0.79:

• Windows installer scope is back to the normal ‘per machine’ setting, reverting 0.78’s security workaround. Note: this means that installing the 0.79 or later Windows installer will not automatically uninstall 0.78, if 0.78 was installed using its default ‘per user’ scope. In that situation we recommend uninstalling 0.78 first. If both end up installed, uninstalling both and then re-installing the new version will fix things up.
• Terminal mouse tracking: support for mouse movements which are not drags.
• Terminal mouse tracking: support for horizontal scroll events (eg generated by trackpads).
• Backwards compatibility fix: certificate-based user authentication now works with OpenSSH 7.7 and earlier.
• Bug fix: in a session using the ‘Raw’ protocol, pressing ^D twice in the terminal window could cause an assertion failure.
• Bug fix: terminal output could hang if a resize control sequence was sent by the server (and was not disabled in the Features panel) but PuTTY’s window was set to non-resizable in the Window panel.
• Bug fix: GTK PuTTY could fail an assertion if a resize control sequence was sent by the server while the window was docked to one half of the screen in KDE.
• Bug fix: GTK PuTTY could fail an assertion if you tried to change the font size while the window was maximized.
• Bug fix: the ‘bell overload’ timing settings were misinterpreted by Unix PuTTY and pterm 0.77/0.78; if any settings were saved using these versions, confusion can persist with newer versions.
• Bug fix: SSH authentication banners were not reliably printed if a server sent one immediately before closing the connection (eg intended as a user-visible explanation for the connection closure).
• Bug fix: the ‘close’ command in PSFTP always reported failure, so that ending a psftp -b batch script with it would cause PSFTP as a whole to believe it had failed, even if everything worked fine.
• Bug fix: certificate handling would do the wrong thing, for RSA keys only, if you specified a detached certificate to go with a PPK file that had a different certificate embedded.
• Bug fix: Windows Pageant’s option to write out a configuration file fragment for Windows OpenSSH now works even if you have a space in your user name.
• Bug fix: in local-line-editing mode, pressing ^U now just clears the line, instead of clearing it and then inserting a literal ^U.
• Several bug fixes in edge cases of terminal wrapping, involving double-width characters.