Softpanorama Bulletin
Vol 24, No.08 (August, 2012)

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History of WinSCP Development

• Introduction
• History
• Scripting interface

Introduction

WinSCP was created by Martin Prikryl and like most OFMs is a one-man project. This the only high quality, active development project of OFM that is using GNU license,

He started this project in March 2000, while working in the IT department of University of Economics in Prague. The temporary name “WinSCP” (Windows Secure CoPy) was chosen until a nicer name was thought of (which never actually happened). Along with Filezilla, WinSCP was one of the first GUI clients for SSH on Microsoft Windows but from the very beginning it has higher quality. As a client, I prefer it to Filezilla any time of the day.

This is an interesting product, not only due to talent and persistence of the author, Martin Prikryl but also because its popularity exposed one interesting feature about OFMs. Early OFMs were often used with one panel on a floppy drive and the other on the local hard drive. Predominant mode of usage of modern OFMs is with one panel of a remote site (sftp, ftp or other filesystem) and the other on the local hard drive).

Due to this specialization WinSCP has several interesting features:

• Elaborate set of favorites, which can be session-based or "global". Also they are different for the host (local computer on which WInCSP is running) and the target (remote computer). This makes it a better sysadmin tool then many other OFMs, as navigating to the necessary directory in other OFMs is a more cumbersome process.  Another important advantage is that several session are supported simultaneously and you can "stack" them  in a way you wish.  Switching is via convenient pull down menu.
• Editing of remote file works normally
• You can have multiple open sessions with remote sites.
• It uses PuTTY format of SSH keys. It can execute PuTTYgen and Pageant (from  Tools menu on Login dialog).

Another distinctive feature of WinSCP is that it one of the few OFMs which supports scripting interface.

At the same time set of saved sessions is flat list, which became badly manageable as soon as you have  have several dozen of sites to connect. Using a standard panel OFM approach it is easy to make them a tree with groups, but so far this was not done. 

History

WinSCP is a Czech project which was started by Martin Prikryl around March 2000 while he was working at IT department of the University of Economics in Prague . As it is an open source project released under GPL with a single developer, there is a great danger that it dies from malnutrition.  So far, thanks God, this did not happen and the project is now 13 years old.  For OFM this is a pretty substantial term equal to the life span of Norton Commander (it lasted from 1984 to 1997 -- 13 years). It is also the only major OFM project that was launched in XXI century and managed to reach wide audience.

According to Martin Prikryl, the original idea came from Jan Havlicek.

In fact he wanted the tool a great deal. And he bothered me for weeks until I finally decided to implement it for him, without actually needing it myself beforehand. He was also the first one who spread the word about WinSCP on the Internet, before the project pages were set up.

During late 2000 distribution of the first releases of WinSCP 1.0 was started. The first WinSCP site was set up in October 2000 with the address winscp.vse.cz. It was designed by Katerina Sramkova. Version 1.0 supported the SCP protocol over SSH-1 only. There were several publicly available builds of the 1.0 release. Beside this there was never another release of the 1.x series. In addition to the English version, there was also a Czech one.

As version 1.0 was the first major project Martin Prikryl, its design suffered from multiple shortcomings.  But he did not abandon his project like many OFM authors do, but decided to continue, rewriting it from scratch. The resulting new version was released in October 2001 as version 2.0 beta. This version introduced SSH-2, public key authentication, alternative Explorer interface and several other features. It took approximately a year to stabilize this version and release a production version. It was version 2.2, released in January 2003.

Version 3.0 also introduced support for the alternative to SCP, the SFTP protocol. Over time it evolved from the alternative to the primary protocol. Despite this, an established name “WinSCP” was preserved.

After the author left the University the project was moved to SourceForge. That move was completed in July 2003 (winscp.sourceforge.net). While WinSCP was an open-source project since its beginning, with the  migration to SourceForge it adopted the GPL license.

Since September 2003, WinSCP is also available as a plugin to the FAR file manager. Version 3.4 released in September 2003 was the first localized version since 1.0. There were Czech, Japanese, Russian and Spanish translations. Many other translations were introduced in later versions.  March 2005 the WinSCP site moved the second time. The new address is winscp.net and the site is partly hosted on TeamForge. File downloads, CVS and other features are still hosted on SourceForge.

In May 2005 wiki with the documentation became available.

In April 2007 version 4.0 was released, introducing support for the old insecure FTP protocol to finally cover all file transfer needs of WinSCP users. In December 2007 WinSCP became available as a plugin to the Altap Salamander file manager. 

The current version as of Feb 2013 is 5.1.4. Version 5.2 which is in beta improves user interface:

• Using “Download” and “Upload” commands to distinguish copying to local and remote directories respectively.
• Using “Download and Delete” and “Upload and Delete” commands instead of “Move” to distinguish moving files to local and remote directories respectively.
• Optionally keeping completed transfers in queue list for configurable period of time. 584
• Replaced file operation toolbar and bottom hot key bar with specialized local and remote file toolbars to allow manipulating local/remote files using mouse, without need to change panel focus (Commander interface only).
• Replaced Selection toolbar with specialized local and remote Selection toolbars (Commander interface only).
• Added label to the most important toolbar buttons. They can be optionally hidden including already existing labels like Command-line label (Commander interface), Address label (Explorer interface) and New session tab label.
• Moved Commands of Commander interface toolbar first.
• Find files command moved from Commands toolbar to Remote Navigation toolbar and is now available regardless of focused panel.
• Renamed Add to Bookmarks command to Add Path to Bookmarks.
• Removed Close toolbar button from Editor and Log windows.
• Session menu and toolbar reorganized.
• Increased height of path labels (Commander interface only).
• User interface icons are shown also in Setup.
• Turned off automatic stretching of Transfer settings toolbar.
• Column Attr is hidden by default on local panel.
• Default (installation) width of the Commander interface is larger, if the screen resolution allows it.
• Added Download and Download and Delete buttons on Commands toolbar of Explorer interface.
• Moved Panels node on Preferences dialog to the top-level to reduce nesting.
• Horizontal line above file background transfer queue list splitter to highlight its presence.
• Disabling whole Once Empty submenu, when queue is empty.
• Using own context menu for local files (similar to existing context menu for remote files) by default.
• First column in Editor list in preferences is editor name.
• Icons are no longer dimmed with Office XP theme.
• Tab with disconnected session is greyed.
• Removed SSH Protocol version from Site tooltip.
• When file cannot be loaded using selected encoding in Internal editor, error is shown. On error loading default encoding, attempts to load using another encoding. 971

Scripting interface

WinSCP offers scripting interface that you can use to automate many operations that it supports, including file transfers, synchronization and other operations. You can use either Windows command interpreter which is adequate for simple tasks or Windows Scripting Host.  For example here is a script that uploads a single file:

option batch abort
option confirm off
open [email protected]
put examplefile.txt /home/user/
exit

You can assemble as many commands as you wish  into a script file. You can also use the /script command line option to pass the script to the WinSCP executable. For example you can embed the complete command line into a Windows batch file (.bat), like as follows:

@echo off
winscp.com /script=myscript.txt

If you have many ssuch files and execute them often you can make a shortcuts to desktop(either to batch file (.bat) or you can enter full command line in the shortcut icon properties.

If the wrapping batch file takes filename as command line parameter you can use it by dropping files on the icon. Windows automatically run the batch file and passes path to dropped file as a command-line parameter.

In a similar way you can put the shortcut to the batch file into Explorer’s ‘Send To’ context menu (c:\documents and settings\username\sendto). 

You can use WScript.Shell to execute WinSCP console interface tool and feed the script commands (using input stream), without creating temporary script file:

var shell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");
// run (make it log to XML)
var exec = shell.Exec("winscp.com /log=log.xml");
// feed the commands
exec.StdIn.Write(
    "option batch abort\n" +
    "open mysession\n" +
    "ls\n" +
    "exit\n");
// wait until it finishes and collect its output
var output = exec.StdOut.ReadAll();
// optionally print the output
WScript.Echo(output);

Etc

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