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A Better Telnet for Windows

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console telnet in semi-transparent console2 powershell sessionThere’s no really nice way to say it: the telnet client in Windows is a little strange at best. I mostly use telnet to debug text-based TCP services. The Microsoft telnet implementation isn’t very good for this. I have used a PowerShell script to fill the gap by piping stdin and stdout to the console but sometimes I actually want telnet. I don’t want to go on a tirade about its problems here but telnet doesn’t work the way I want. What I really want is the telnet from GNU inetutils but compiled for Win32 with no extra runtime requirements. I don’t want to have to install Cygwin or MSys or SUA in order to get telnet.

I looked into this a little bit and it seems like inetutils has a lot of dependencies that make it hard to compile to run directly on Win32 without any POSIX layer. I also found an abandoned project on SourceForge called Console Telnet for Win32 which is under GPL, supports ANSI color codes and seems to have quite good VT100 emulation. The last code drop is from October 2000 and was originally written for old versions of Visual C++ or Borland C++, but it looked promising.

I spent a little time fixing up headers and a few functions here and there to get the code to compile with Visual Studio 2010. It works and it works pretty much like the GNU inetutils version of telnet except that it is annoyingly chatty about printing out info about its configuration on every connection so I put the chatty stuff behind an #IFDEF CHATTY and compiled without that CHATTY symbol defined which pretty much gave me what I wanted. It works by piping stdin/stdout to the TCP connection and doesn’t do any crazy erasing of your entire console scrollback buffer the way that Microsoft’s telnet does. It also doesn’t crash Console2.

I haven’t done extensive testing but everything seems to be working on my computer. I watched as much of Star Wars as I could stand at towel.blinkenlights.nl (“telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl”) and I’ve passed a bunch of HTML GET queries and responses through it.

Get the Code and Binary

Here’s the source code and compiled binary. You need to have telnet.exe, telnet.cfg and telnet.ini together in a directory for it to run correctly.



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