The home page is clearly organized and readable, only having some text and links. What more do you want from a website that only exists to distribute one program? There's a link to the download page right on top. It's more than good enough. Do you need flashy CSS animations and a Konami Code to find a website cool enough for you?
There's not a single thing wrong with PuTTY's UX either. The terminal area is just a terminal area that does what it's supposed to and behaves exactly like any other terminal emulator, and the options are clearly organized. There is literally no meaningful change you could make to improve its UX because it's already optimal.
I support the love. PuTTY serves well as an SSH client, many complaints here are about other issues like security, https, trusting binaries, GUIs, and really it's not fair to Simon and team who kindly released the program for us all to use. Nowadays I only use it when I'm unfortunate enough to need to do work on a Windows machine. Thanks guys for releasing this free software.
It's a functional application. It's not well designed. It's not "portable". The hate is because it is so mediocre it's insulting to anyone who uses Windows and has to suffer through it.
If you prefer it, that's fine, but some people expect a bit more from their tools than merely being "functional" no matter how ugly.
It runs on various unixes (without wine), it ran on win32 Alpha (another meaning of the word portable) - I'll give you ugly, but its fully functioned, and arguably much easier to use than the command line openssh-client.
Well designed can refer to more than just the interface. It meets historical windows human interface guidelines too.
I'd also suggest that its an open source project, and could be forked, with a new UI wrapped around the existing pretty good terminal emulation.
I think portable here is referring to being able to run software from a USB drive without running an installer or just being able to download a file into a temporary folder and removing trace of it by deleting the folder when done. I feel a lot of the initial love for putty was the fact that it was portable (and it also helped back in the day that the download was so small, too.)
It is possible as far as I know that it doesn't meet the formal definition in some way, but since you used the term in air quotes and didn't qualify it (like 'but it stores settings in the registry' or similar), I think you may be interpreting the term differently (i.e. I don't think the term is being used to suggest that you can use the same executable across operating systems.)
This symptom can point to your translation being incompatible with the text stream the terminal is being presented with. That problem may be overcome by switching putty's 'character code' setting to UTF8.
I wonder how much of the hate here is from people who don't understand the problems that are inherent to writing a terminal emulator. It makes sense to be frustrated by it, but it's not putty's fault.
I've been using putty for about fifteen years, and use ncurses extensively. The only thing I've wanted to do in PuTTY that I've been unable to (that I can remember) is to get 24-bit colour working. It may be that I'm making the situation artificially simple for myself because I run everything in tmux, which may filter some translation issues.
Your point in another thread about the putty defaults being non-standard is a good point, and the only meaningful criticism I can see if it here. Not defaulting to UTF8 may be another.
IMHO PuTTY's default behaviour of pasting the clipboard's contents on right click is really annoying and unexplainable; neither native Windows apps or Unix xterms work like that. At our university we use IRC (via SSH+Screen+irssi mostly) for communication and every year I see over a dozen of people tripping into that.
Also, the default encoding was changed to UTF-8 only quite recently - IMO that should have been done much earlier.
> neither native Windows apps or Unix xterms work like that
That's because it's middle-click instead of right-click in X. But windows traditionally did not have 3-button mouses, so right-click it is. I use middle-click to paste several times per hour.
That page is awful. Period. What do I want from a website that exists to distribute one program? Some effort. Some class. Something more than the software equivalent of being wrapped in greasy newspaper.
When you say "its UX because it's already optimal" you're basically saying "I do not value fit and finish, I am purely interested in functionality, I also make my own underwear out of used socks."
Why am I so upset? It's because of this attitude. Taking the time to make a nice page and present your software with pride shows you care. Using the same old HTML from 1997 says you don't care.
Would it kill programmers to talk to designers and do some knowledge sharing?
There's not a single thing wrong with PuTTY's UX either. The terminal area is just a terminal area that does what it's supposed to and behaves exactly like any other terminal emulator, and the options are clearly organized. There is literally no meaningful change you could make to improve its UX because it's already optimal.