For as long as I can remember it’s been a royal pain in the butt to log into a Linuxy server from a Windows box and get work done in Japanese. Tera Term, with fairly good multiple-encoding support, was fine back in the days when password authentication was still thought to be secure and most of us associated ssh with testy librarians.

I recently had high hopes for a reincarnation of Tera Term as UTF-8 Tera Term Pro with TTSH2. Though there seems to be a lot of activity, I could never get key-based authentication to work and had to go back to a rather clumsy, hacked version of PuTTY.

I’d downloaded Poderosa some time back but never really played around with it; for the most part I thought it was tabbed, scalable Cygwin. Recently, however, I noticed it’s nifty little encoding pulldown.

Convenient.

Rather than just launching Cygwin I tried out it’s SSH key wizard, maneuvered a login, broke the window into three or four tabs and then split them again vertically, horizontally, and wow.. this thing is really easy to use.

What’s really amazing is that the Poderosa project seems to be sponsored by the Japanese government. Brilliant, as this is a hugely powerful tool for Japanese engineers; many of whom suffer post-traumatic multiple encoding disorder. (“Ok, so if I cat this text through recode maybe I can see what’s going on here, as long as the hankaku doesn’t mojibake..”)

That said, I’d really love to know which section of the government they convinced to cough up funds, and how on Earth they presented it. Someone higher up must be a Linux engineer.