How to change the bell style and settings in PuTTY
A terminal bell is a sort of notification produced by an SSH server when some things happen or appear, such as an error message or global announcement
By default, PuTTY will use the Windows system ding whenever it’s told to signal a bell. This can sometimes be annoying, especially if something’s triggering the bell repeatedly
To change the bell style and settings, first choose a saved session from the menu
Click Load
Then, go to Bell
First, you can set the style of the terminal bell
Let’s change ours to Visual bell, which will cause the window to flash instead of making a sound
You can also change it to None to disable the bell completely, force it to beep using the PC speaker, or choose a custom sound file to play
Next section. With the buttons above, you can make the taskbar and window title notify you if you receive a bell when the window is not in focus
Flashing will cause the taskbar to blink, whereas Steady will display a solid color
The bottom section allows you to disable the bell temporarily when over-used, as defined by the settings. The defaults here should work fine
Return to the Session panel
Be sure to Save your session, or else the settings won’t stick
Then, let’s test out the bell
Log in
One way to trigger a bell is by pressing Backspace at the beginning of a line
The window will flash momentarily to represent a bell signal
This tutorial is now complete. You now know how to change the bell style and settings in PuTTY
How to change PuTTY’s appearance
If you’re going to be using PuTTY a lot, you’ll probably want to customize its appearance to what you like best. PuTTY has a number of settings that allow you to do this
Once you have PuTTY open, load a session from the menu
Then, go to Appearance
The first settings here allow you to adjust the cursor’s appearance
The default is Block, but you can change it to one of the other two, if you want. We’ll pick Vertical line
Click this checkbox to make the cursor blink
Now, for the Font settings
Click Change…
Select a new font from the list. Only monospaced fonts will show up; these are fonts whose characters are all the same width
Change its style, or just leave it set to Regular
Adjust the size to something a bit bigger
Then, click OK
Notice… the font name and size listed here has changed
Mark this checkbox to hide the mouse pointer when typing
Last on this page, you can adjust the appearance of the window border. Use this value to control the size of the Gap between text and window edge
To display a sunken edge border, click this checkbox
Now, go to Colours
Let’s change the background and foreground colors
Hit Modify
Choose a Basic color, or pick a custom color using the tool at right. Let’s use white
Click OK
Now, for the Foreground color
We’ll pick Black for this
Feel free to change any other colors you want
Now, return to the Session page
Save our changes to the session
Then, press Open
You should notice that this looks quite a bit different than it does with the default settings
That cursor color is a little bright on a white background. You can change it with the Colours settings, where we just were
Log in
Test out a command
That’s it! You now know how to change PuTTY’s appearance
How to copy and paste to and from a PuTTY window
It may not be obvious to you, but it is possible to copy and paste to and from a PuTTY window. This tutorial will show you how to do that
Copying and pasting in PuTTY is very easy, but different from the way it’s done in most other programs
You’ll need to be logged in to a PuTTY session before you begin
All you have to do is left click and drag to make a selection
As soon as you let go of the mouse button, the selection is instantly copied to your clipboard and ready to be pasted
Simply click off of the selection to deselect it
Now, let’s paste the selection into another window. For this tutorial, we’ll just use a Notepad window that we already have open
Right click, then Paste
The selection has been copied and pasted successfully
Now, let’s try copying and pasting an SSH command we’ve stored in a different Notepad window
Right-click and Copy
Return to PuTTY
Simply right-click to paste
Press Enter to execute the command
You can also select and copy a rectangular region in PuTTY. For our purpose, this is useful to copy just the filenames in this directory listing
Hold down ALT, then click and drag from the top left corner to the bottom right
Switch back to Notepad
Press CTRL+V to paste
The rectangular region you copied has been pasted successfully
This completes the tutorial. You should now know how to copy and paste to and from PuTTY
How to create a log file of your PuTTY session
This tutorial assumes you have already downloaded PuTTY and located its .exe
Double click the PuTTY icon to launch the application
Now let’s learn how to create a log file of your session
Then click Logging
The logging settings are listed here on the right. Let’s demonstrate how to save a log file to your desktop
Click All session output
Leave Putty.log as the log file name
Then click Browse to choose the save location
Ensure Desktop is selected here…
Then click Save
… then click Open to begin your session
Ensure ‘Ask the user every time’ is selected…
Type your username, then push Enter
Type your password, then push Enter
Now let’s type a simple shell command. PuTTY can log dozens of commands within your session
Type a simple test command here, then press Enter
Now type Exit, then push Enter to close PuTTY
We can see that a log file has been saved to the desktop
Now let’s open the log file… double click Putty
The log file contains all commands entered, great for saving your sessions to review at a later date
This is the end of the tutorial. You now know how to create a log file of your PuTTY sessions
How to clean up your PuTTY sessions
This tutorial assumes you have already opened your Windows command line
Now let’s learn how to clean up your Putty sessions from the Windows command line
Type the path to your Putty.exe here
Then type -cleanup here, then press
Click Yes to clear your sessions
That’s it! The PuTTY sessions have been cleared, or cleaned up
This is the end of the tutorial. You now know how to clean up your PuTTY sessions
How to change character settings in PuTTY
This tutorial assumes you have already opened PuTTY
Now let’s learn how to change the character settings
Click Translation
Then click here to show the character set drop down
Now select the character set you’d like to use. Be sure your computer supports the character set
Click Session to save the new settings
This is the end of the tutorial. You now know how to change the character settings in PuTTY
That’s it! The character set has been changed and saved
How to increase the scroll buffer size in PuTTY
You may have noticed that PuTTY does not allow you to scroll up very far
This can become annoying when running programs that have lots of output you might need to scroll through and review
Let’s look at an example
We have already logged in to one of our saved SSH sessions
One command that can sometimes produce a lot of output is ls — the command to list a directory’s contents
Type ls -l / to list the contents of the root directory. Remember — press Enter to execute a shell command
Now, type the command shown to list the contents of all directories contained by the home directory
Scroll up
Here is the command we just typed
Above that, the output of the previous command
Scroll up a bit more
As you can see, we’ve reached the top of the scrollbar, and still can’t see the first command we typed; it’s just barely out of range
Let’s increase the size of the scroll buffer. Close this session and re-open PuTTY to the configuration window
Select the session from the list, then click Load
Then, go to Window
Enter a higher value for Lines of scrollback. We’ll change ours from 200 to 20000
Return to the Session category
Click Save
Finally, press Open
Now, log in normally, as seen earlier in this series
Once logged in, let’s test out the new scroll buffer size
Type the command from before, several times. End each line with a shell comment as shown, thus marking each one
Watch the size of the scrollbar
Again
One more time
Now, scroll up
Here’s the first command. Clearly, our change worked!
This is the end of the tutorial. You now know how to increase the scroll buffer size in PuTTY
How to load, save or delete server connection settings in PuTTY
This tutorial assumes you have already downloaded PuTTY and located its .exe
Double click the PuTTY icon to launch the application
Now let’s learn how to load, save or delete server connection settings
First let’s learn how to save connection settings
Type the server IP address here
Type a saved session name here
Then click Save to save the settings
We can then proceed to connect to our server
Now let’s say we want to load a saved connection setting… let’s open PuTTY again
Choose the saved connection setting you want…
… then click Load
You will notice your server connection settings are now shown here
We can then proceed to connect to our server
To delete a saved session, first select the session name you want to delete here
Then click Delete
To exit PuTTY, simply close the window
That’s it! The saved session has been removed from the list
This is the end of the tutorial. You now know how to load, save and delete server connection settings
How to start PuTTY in a maximized window
This tutorial assumes you have located PuTTY, and starts from your desktop
Now let’s learn how to start Putty maximized so the command line window is as large as possibe
Right click the PuTTY icon
Then click Properties
Once the Properties window is open, be sure the Shortcut tab is selected
Click Normal Window
Then select Maximized
Scroll down
Click Apply
Then click OK
This is the end of the tutorial. You now know how to configure PuTTY so it launches in a maximized window
How to open a PuTTY session, and exit a session
Double click the PuTTY icon to launch it
This tutorial assumes you have already downloaded PuTTY and located it on your desktop
Now let’s learn how to open PuTTY, configure the server connection settings for SSH, and launch the command line
Then click Open
This is the PuTTY default screen. This tutorial will show how to enter your connection settings to connect via SSH with Port 22.
Enter the main server IP into the Host Name field.
The Port number is shown here
Select the connection type here
This is the PuTTY command line. Before you begin, you will need to log into the server
Type your username here, then press Enter
Next, type in your password, or right-click to paste it
You are now logged into your server via SSH with PuTTY. You can view what IP last logged in, and on what date. From here you can run dozens of commands to manage your server.
To exit, simply type Exit here, then push Enter…
Or simply close the window
This is the end of the tutorial. You now know how to log into your server using SSH with PuTTY
How to download and install PuTTY
This tutorial assumes you are using the Windows operating system, have already opened your favorite web browser and browsed to Google.com
Now let’s learn how to download and install PuTTY
Type Download Putty in the Google search bar
Then click Google Search
Click Putty Download Page
You will be taken to the PuTTY Download Page. Scroll down to find the download links.
Click putty.exe to begin the download
Click Save File to save putty.exe to your computer
Then click Run to open PuTTY and get started
That’s it! You have successfully downloaded and launched PuTTY
To exit PuTTY, simply close the window
This is the end of the tutorial. You now know how to download and open Putty.
How to start a SSH session from the command line
This tutorial assumes you have already opened your Windows command line
Now let’s learn how to start a SSH session from the command line
Type the path to Putty.exe here
Then type the connection type you wish to use (i.e. -ssh, -telnet, -rlogin, -raw)
Type the username…
Then type ‘@’ followed by the server IP address
Finally, type the port number to connect to, then press Enter.
This is the end of the tutorial. You now know how to start a PuTTY session via command line
A PuTTY session has now been opened