Beta Testing

From time to time, you’ll find here the latest changes and newest features for what will come in the next release. These ‘release candidates’ have a limited lifespan, an expiration date. Not to be confused with your 30-day demo period, release candidates expire on a specific date that it will announce to you each time you run it, something like this:

By that time, either a NEW release candidate will be announced (on this page) or the release candidate will become final and posted to the normal download section of the website.

Current Release Candidate: AbsoluteTelnet 13.16 RC24
Deployed Date: April 6, 2026
Expiration Date: April 18, 2026


Download links:

32/64 bit download

32 bit download


This release candidate for version 13.16 contains the following changes:

RC1

  • Added support for user certificates and host CA
  • Expanded support of smartcard authentication to include ECC (ECDSA) smartcard keys
  • Updated login/authentication semantics to support NFC smartcards and ‘tap’ to login
  • Recognize smartcards that are backed by the Certificates in windows and route auth through NCrypt and friends
  • Added support for paste bracketing, which makes multiline pastes behave correctly in BASH, VIM, and others.
  • Modified behavior of DECCOLM slightly so it’s less likely to change terminal screen width unexpectedly.
  • Added global option for ‘make this the default sftp client’ (yes, no, prompt)

    RC2

    • Fixed shell extension crash

    RC3

    • Relaxed shutdown/endsession semantics

    RC4

    • Correct initialization sequence in shell extension

    RC5

    • Tweak registration step during install

    RC6

    • Fully rely on InstallHelper for all install steps
    • Better control of start and end of smartcard watcher thread

    RC7

    • Internal testing

    RC8

    • Internal testing

    RC9

    • Internal testing

    RC10

    • Internal testing

    RC11

    • Internal testing

    RC12

    • Fixed initialization of smartcard watcher in hostile environments

    RC16

    • Fixed buffer overrun in install helper
    • Tweaked smartcard insert watcher so it works with any card insertion, not just first one
    • Fixed window focus and modality with smartcard signing PIN prompt

    RC21

    • Hardening & testing prior to deployment
    • Fixed a few thread hang/shutdown issues
    • Fix GDI leak introduced in 13.07

    RC22

    • Stability improvements for multithreaded windows
    • Implemented ‘FAINT’ text attribute to support Claude Code
    • Implemented rapid blink
    • Implemented scrollback clearing extension of xterm
    • Implemented crossout text attribute
    • Font glyph detection, substitution and owner draw to render missing characters

    RC23

    • Fixed implementation of scrollback clearing
    • Consolidate font list to exclude multiple styles of the same font (Cascadia Mono, Cascadia Code etc )
    • Added support for multi-line URL detection
    • Added ‘copy url’ and ‘goto url’ to context menu when hovering over URLs

    RC24

    • Control-right click now opens context menu even when normal right click is reassigned to something else
    • Handle wrapped URLs with margins (space on left and right)
    • Implement fallback font for characters not in the currently selected font. We don’t use font linking, so windows doesn’t do this for us.
    • Implement some private mode features for clude code experience (1004 – focus reporting, 2026 – screen sync, 2031 – Palette reporting)