Looks decent at a glance, but like many people, I've been using WinSCP for several years and would need solid reasons to switch - I'd really like to see a comparison to WinSCP in the readme.
This is alot more powerful then winscp. I might compare it more closely to MobaXterm, but that is build with more of a terminal mindset.
Snowflake seems to be built with more of a gui mindset. It seems pretty useful for intermediate level system admin work or developers.
The main difference between Snowflake and WinScp or Cyberduck or Putty is that they are built mostly for a single task, either file transfer or terminal emulation.
Where Snowflake can do both and more. Purpose is to provide a friendly GUI for common tasks, like killing processes, or rename with sudo.
Its kind of similar to web based admin panels like webmin or ajenti, though they are more tend to be used for veteran sysadmins. But these admin panels needs to be configured and installed on the server, where snowflake works from the local computer without any configuration or installation on server side.
According to the README it's not just an SFTP client, it's providing a combined UI for various remote operations, all executed over SSH. Text editing, system resource monitoring of the remote host (eg. disk space, CPU, locating files), as well as a terminal emulator for good old shell usage. Seems pretty nifty to me, to have all that in one place.
It incorporates JEDIterm, a reworked version of JCTerm and GriTTY, apparently. But the default terminal type that it passes over SSH is "xterm-256color". It is, of course, not identical to XTerm.
For a similar workflow, at least for terminal and editor, is the Remote SSH extension for VS Code... really been enjoying it for a one-off server that is running on a VPS.
I haven't tried dragging or pasting into the file section (which works on local resources), so can't confirm file transfers actually work.
This is very useful.
Note though that all of the following doesn't work unless you have ssh access to the server:
- search
- terminal
- monitoring (cpu & memory)
- report of used/available disk space
- system information
Mixing SFTP for file transfer with raw commands for remote file operations seems like an interesting concept. Are there other tools which have done this?
You could write an entire OS single handedly, name it via a password generator, and one of the comments on HN would be how the name is still somewhat similar to <x> instead of talking about the project.
Coincidentally, it's also the name of a famous, early graphics demo (1960s), compare https://www.masswerk.at/snowflake (URL redirects to an emulation on the same site).
didnt work for me... I can connect all day long to some personal servers I have via filezilla (port 21) and in snowflake I just get a spinner and then it fails (and I do modify the port)... I WANT this to work as I like it.. but so far no bueno.
Sorry, I thought it was quite self-evident, although probably mostly for people having to use this technology.
I don't want to get into flame wars or extensive argumentation but from my personal experience dealing with Java in the past, both from the application user's side as well as development side has been such a pain. It was a complete bloatware package, slow and ugly, RAM hungry, disk I/O hungry. Even the java.com website is ugly as hell and not changed during the last 15 years. Doesn't really increase confidence for improved experience.
You could replace java with website development and it would probably still be true. I suppose the tense also needs to change. Lets try it:
> from my personal experience dealing with web development in the present, both from the application user's side as well as development side is such a pain. It is a complete bloatware package, slow and ugly, RAM hungry, disk I/O hungry.
I find electron apps generally look and interact better... though this app looks decent. I've been using the Remote SSH extension for VS Code as a remote editor across ssh, which has worked phenominally well for me.
You're being downvoted, probably for your curtness, but launching the app...
It's a terrible Java GUI.
No offense to the developer, I'm sure the technical parts are great, and the GUI probably makes more sense on other OSes (macOS which I'm running it on is specifically listed as not yet supported).
It launches in full screen(?!), extremely basic UI consistency is utterly broken (like option-arrow keys to jump between words in text fields), the "new connection" dialog scrolls SIDEWAYS on a 4K display, it's just insane. 20 years in and Java still does not produce cross-platform GUIs without major, major work. At least with Electron, text fields work as expected.
Hopefully by adding macOS support they'll fix these things but usually with Java apps "adding macOS support" just means adding a .app wrapper and app signing around the .jar.
No offense to the developer, I'm sure the technical parts are great, and the GUI probably makes more sense on other OSes (macOS which I'm running it on is specifically listed as not yet supported).
I know cross-platform is cool on HN at the moment, but honestly if it doesn't have a native macOS interface, I'll pass.
Having a different user interface paradigm for each program reminds me of the old Windows days, and is one of the biggest benefits of switching to a Mac. Perhaps it's because I use a dozen or more different programs during the day, but I'm so much more productive with a consistent user experience.
Obviously, there are exceptions. VS Codium is one. But the benefits of such an exception have to really outweigh the loss in productivity.
I mostly agree, but I also work with enterprise software products that have legacy code bases with baggage that is over 10 years old, so there is still a lot of Java software that sucks. We're talking about applications that take minutes to just load and display a window on otherwise fast hardware. And in some cases, the entire purpose of the application is to basically slap a GUI around an XML configuration file.
