My favorite port of OpenSSH for Windows OS is CopSSH, basically I’m running CopSSH more or less on every production Windows server. One bugger so far was the lack of decent terminal editor that would work out of the box after CopSSH installation. Recently, I started to consolidate different versions of CopSSH (the oldest being 1.4.6) and was happy when I discovered that my favorite editor on Linux, nano 2.2.6, works fine under cygwin environment that ships with the latest CopSSH 4.0.2. All that you need to do is to:

• download and install CopSSh from Copssh_4.0.2_Installer.zip
• download and install Control Panel update from ICW_COPSSHCP_2.0.3_installer.zip
• download nano-2.2.6.zip
• copy nano.exe from nano-2.2.6.zip archive to CopSSH bin directory, for example copying nano.exe from my local machine to Windows x64 server with scp:


scp nano.exe alesk@winbox:"/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/CopSSH/bin"

That’s it. You can now edit text files without the need to bypass (with WinSCP for example) ssh terminal session just for the sake of editing some configuration file.

Nano doesn’t work with older releases of cygwin that ships with CopSSH (for example on 1.4.6) due to the version mismatch of cygwin1.dll library. I didn’t bother to look for a workaround, since my objective is to deploy the latest version of CopSSH anyhow.