PuTTY wish idn

This is a mirror. The primary PuTTY web site can be found here.

summary: Support for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.
priority: low: We aren't sure whether to fix this or not.

We've had a couple of requests for IDN support (RFC3490 et al) in PuTTY.

Ideally this would be implemented by the OS. However it's been suggested to us that Microsoft at least won't add anything "until at least Longhorn". There are various libraries out there such as the VeriSign IDN SDK and GNU libidn.

It's not clear that IDN support in PuTTY is worth the developer effort or the binary space, given that (presumably) you can just type xn--whatever into the "host name" box. With (say) a web browser, it is normal to want to access lots of different web sites you've never visited before, whose addresses you've got off a cereal packet, and so on; the domain name is a relatively important part of the process. With PuTTY, you typically access a small number of sites with which you have prior arrangements, and often you just put the domain name into a saved session and forget about it.

Audit trail for this wish.

If you want to comment on this web site, see the Feedback page.
(last revision of this bug record was at 2006-01-23 21:13:30 +0000)