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

Test out a command

That’s it! You now know how to change PuTTY’s appearance