How to change PuTTY’s appearance

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 change the bell style and settings in PuTTY

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 create a log file of your PuTTY session

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 copy and paste to and from a PuTTY window

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 start a SSH sessions from the command line

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

How to download and install 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 open a PuTTY session, and exit a session

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 start PuTTY in a maximized window

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 load, save or delete server connection settings 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 increase the scroll buffer size in PuTTY

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 change character settings in PuTTY

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 clean up 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