Swish aims to provide access to files over SSH/SFTP from Windows Explorer in as seamless a manner as is currently possible for network drives.
Current status: Alpha
Swish doesn't let you access the contents of your files yet
Alpha status means that Swish is currently very experimental and largely incomplete. It is not ready for day-to-day use. If you are curious how it might look, by all means download and install it but please bear this in mind.
Recently, stability has been greatly improved. Swish now uses libssh2 (http://www.libssh2.org) to make the SFTP connections which is much better than the previous PuTTY wrapper. The eventual aim is to offer a choice of back-end implementations with different capabilities, but currently there is only the one.
Integration with Explorer has improved significantly on previous versions. Now you can add connections using the Explorer Tools menu and they will be saved in the Registry?. The icons in the SFTP folders are now chosen based on the file's extension (though this isn't working on [Windows98 Windows 98]) as is the context (right-click) menu.
In the latest release (0.2.1.8) we finally added a few file management features. You can now delete? and rename files and folders. More simple features such as creating a new directory should be coming soon.
Limitations
Swish can only perform simple password-based authentication?. This doesn't include the, so-called, keyboard-interactive password authentication which is used on many systems. Also, as can't yet authenticate a host's key it will blindly connect to any host you specify - *watch out*!
There is no 64-bit build yet as I don't have a 64-bit machine to test it on. If you do and are so inclined, feel free to try building Swish from source yourself (it's not hard, at least on 32-bit machines) and let me know if any changes are needed.
Future releases
The next job is to add keyboard-interactive authentication. This should allow those of us with FreeBSD boxes to connect to them.
I'm trying to work on tasks roughly in order of usefulness so after that I hope to focus on accessing the contents of the files. Security nuts won't like this but I think accessing your data is more useful to the average user than being able to authenticate the remote host's key, for instance. This and other features will follow though, in due course.
Feature summary
- File-system browsing
- Simple password authentication
- Cached connections to the server
- File and folder renaming
- File and folder deletion?
Still to do
- Accessing files on the server
- Copying files to the server
- Modifying files on the server
- Keyboard-interactive authentication
- Public-key authentication
- Host-key verification (aka known_hosts).
- Removing saved hosts
- Vista support
Supported Operating Systems
32-bit:
- Windows XP? (most tested).
- Windows 2000? (regularly tested).
- Windows Me? (rarely tested).
- Windows 98 (regularly tested).
Not sure about Vista but try it if you like, likewise for any 64-bit Windows.
See Supported Operating Systems for more information.
Requirements
Internet Explorer 5.5 or greater (may work with 5.01 but required SHRegGetPath() function seems broken).
For Windows 9x, the Microsoft Layer for Unicode (MSLU, aka Unicows).
If you want to build Swish yourself, see Build Requirements for more information.
This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit (http://www.openssl.org/).
This product includes cryptographic software written by Eric Young (eay@…).
