Goodbye Fugu, Hello Cyberduck
I’ve been using Fugu as my SFTP (SSH) client for a while now. While I’m grateful for this free and serviceable program it is not without annoyances. It’s a bit clumsy at certificate-based authentication. You have to specify some pretty arcane SSH command-line options (-oIdentityFile=). By itself that wouldn’t be so bad if Fugu didn’t forget those options with every restart – forcing me to re-enter them. The other shortcoming of Fugu is that it only edits with a single program - the so-called “text editor”. It’s configurable which is good – but there’s only one of ‘em. What if you have multiple editors for different kinds of files?
Well I’ve been thinking of switching to Panic Transmit for a while. The Panic apps are just beautiful and Cocoa-licious. While there is no explicit mention of SSH in the text of the Transmit page, I did notice a picture that showed SFTP configuration, so I decided to give Transmit a try. Unfortunately there appears to be no way to induce Transmit to do certificate-based authentication. Apparently only username/password is supported.
Enter Cyberduck.  It’s a Cocoa app like the other two. Unlike Fugu, this one remembers settings across restarts. Cyberduck even has a nice little tray that pops out with your site “bookmarks”. And unlike Transmit, this one does a great job with certificate-based authentication – going beyond Fugu’s cryptic command-line escapes and letting me pick the certificate file from a nice file finder. The other nice thing is that like Transmit, this one supports multiple editors. Very nice. Cyberduck: it takes a few more seconds to download (from TLD .ch = Switzerland) – but it’s definitely worth the wait.