A fork of TightVNC for Windows. A huge shout-out to Konstantin Kaplinskiy and GlavSoft LLC, for a fantastic product.
The improvements are to the user-interface and not to the underlying remote access / control technology, avoiding those more sensitive areas. Claude Opus 5 was used in development.
Get the latest tightvnc-viewer-<version>-x64.zip from the Releases page. Unzip it and run tvnviewer.exe. There is no installer and nothing to register. A 32-bit build is there too if you need one.
Releases carry the viewer only. Use the stock TightVNC server, which this fork does not change.
The exe is unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen warns you the first time. Click "More info", then "Run anyway". Check the SHA-256 hash against the release notes if you want to be sure of what you downloaded.
The viewer reads and writes the same registry keys as stock TightVNC, under HKCU\Software\TightVNC\Viewer. Your existing connection history and settings carry over. So do any changes you make here, if you go back to the stock viewer.
- The File Transfer dialog remembers the last-visited local and remote folders, on a per-host basis.
- In the File Transfer dialog, the local and remote sides support a Places feature:
- You can define places (e.g. "Logs"), backed by one or more folder locations. Selecting a place moves you to the first folder location that exists at the remote. This lets you have easy access to places that are deeply nested, or that have different physical locations on different groups of fielded systems. Each side puts its first four places on buttons above the path box. The rest, plus Edit Places, sit behind the arrow button at the end of that row. Up and Down in the Edit Places dialog set the order, so you choose which four get buttons.
- The File Transfer dialog has options that streamline the transfer process, accessible from the new gear-icon button:
- An option to skip the "Do you wish to upload the selected files?"
- An option to skip the "Do you wish to download the selected files?"
- Support for one or more file patterns for which the Overwrite-confirmation dialog is skipped
- A new
-titleprefix=TEXTcommand-line option puts your own text at the front of the window title, ahead of the remote name. Handy when several viewer windows are open and the taskbar shows only machine names. - As part of this work, retargeted the build at Windows platform v141 (same but drops WinXP).
The starting point is the TightVNC 2.8.88 GPL source, downloaded from https://www.tightvnc.com/download.php, which is the unmodified upstream code by GlavSoft LLC.
That download is the first commit on main, tagged upstream-2.8.88. Nothing else is in that commit.
Windows gives four version fields. This fork uses them as major.minor.upstream-build.fork-build, so 2.8.88.1 is the first fork release built on upstream 2.8.88. Release tags match, as v2.8.88.1.
RELEASING.md has the steps for cutting one.
TightVNC is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. This fork therefore carries the same license.
The full license text is in LICENSE.txt.
Two bundled libraries keep their own licenses. See zlib/LICENSE for zlib, and the legal section of libjpeg/README for libjpeg.
This program comes with no warranty.
Windows and Visual Studio only. Open tightvnc2017.sln and build the project you need.
Build tvnviewer on its own rather than the whole solution. Building everything also builds the installer, which needs the WiX v3 SDK.
The projects target the v141 toolset, which no longer ships with Visual Studio, so it will offer to retarget the solution on load. Decline, and install the "MSVC v141 build tools" component instead. The Windows SDK version lives in Directory.Build.props and defaults to 10.0.26100.0.
- Project site: https://www.tightvnc.com/
- Source downloads: https://www.tightvnc.com/download.php
Report bugs in the local changes here. (Anything reproducible in stock TightVNC would need to go to the upstream instead.)