More and more I have needed a Mac OSX SFTP client for moving web content to various servers- we have knocked off open FTP on all of our web servers, and I need it now for loading content to SourceForge. Pity that my long friend Fetch, used since the early 1990s, has yet to jump up to SFTP.
It has been a road of trying a bunch of different apps, none of which was reliable (many do odd things with file permissions). On the scrap heap is:
- The Truck: Transmit it worked ok (I recall) but was funly with permissions, and you had to pay for it.
- The Captain: Captain FTP yes shareware, not much– my programmer Colen uses it but claims it has quirks.
- The Dud: MacSFTP– could never use the demo, the download was already expired
- The Duck: CyberDuck – Free and a cool icon… I had gotten use out of the Duck last few months, but it overwrites file permissions, you cannot upload a multiple selection of files, and it takes a minutes to register the first transsfer. Worse, every transfer seemed to want me to click to allow a transmission. It never would connect to sourceForge’s server.
And today I think I found the winner– Fugu from the University of Michigan. It is free, has a clean interface, and works well without mucking up permissions. I am still not crazy about two-paned transfer interfaces (I like dragging and dropping from the desktop to.from Fetch)… but that is just a matter of adjustment.
I’m partial to RBrowser. You need to pay $29 to get the version that offers SFTP. The free version does FTP without the secure bit. Works great, does just what you think it should without having to think about it much, let’s you browse the server in columns, list or icon mode just like the OS X finder.