Mac OS X For Unix Geeks, 4th Edition

Chapter 8. Third-Party Tools and Applications

Although Mac OS X ships with an impressive number of applications—including Mail, Safari, the Address Book, iCal, iSync, Automator, and the Xcode tools, just to name a few—many third-party freeware and shareware applications are available to further enrich the Mac OS X experience. This chapter provides an overview of a few applications that we feel will appeal to Unix aficionados.

Frontends for SSH and SFTP

OpenSSH is a free version of the SSH suite of network connectivity tools that provides encrypted replacements for telnet, ftp, rlogin, rcp, and more. As noted earlier in the book, OpenSSH is bundled with Mac OS X. The SSH tools are fully functional from the command line, but several GUIs are available to make SSH-based file transfers easier. One such frontend that may be familiar to some Unix/Linux users is Brian Masney’s GTK+/glib-based gftp (http://www.gftp.org). If you’re a gftp fan, you can install it on Mac OS X using MacPorts. (Despite its name, gftp supports SFTP, a secure file transfer protocol that piggybacks on top of SSH.)

A cross-platform GUI SFTP application that will be familiar to most Microsoft Windows users is Filezilla (http://www.filezilla-project.org). Though it was designed for Windows, Filezilla has been ported to Linux and Mac OS X. Its capabilities are similar to those of some of the other GUIs we’ll look at here, such as Cyberduck and Fugu.

The GUI SFTP application that will be most familiar to old-time Mac users ...