http://dag.wieers.com/blog/content/improving-putty-settings-on-windows
Since I started contract work for a new customer and have been
offered a Windows Thinkpad to connect to the internal network, I have
been looking at ways to make my life more comfortable. Putty is now my
window to
the world work so let's look at how I can make Putty nicer to work with by tweaking its configuration.
PS: Some of these options work equally well for Putty on Linux, put there is little use for that combination.
Skip directly to Putty settings summary.
Configure your Putty first, then make entries.
This is important advice. First configure your environment before you
start using it. This is especially true for Putty, since you always
start off from the default, it is important to configure the default
entry before you create entries from these defaults. It will save you a
lot of time afterwards to get things straight.
So before you make any changes, open the default template in
Category: Session by selecting
Default Settings and pressing the
Load button.
Make SSH the default.
If you have an older version of Putty, chances are that you have Telnet
as the default protocol. Changing it to SSH will probably save you some
time when you start Putty out-of-the-blue. For this go to
Category: Session and select
SSH.
Keep windows around.
Putty cleverly exits when you leave a session, but I don't like that. I
like to be able to still copy&paste from console even when one of my
sessions times out or I closed one bash/session too many. Since I
consider terminal output as possible interesting information I don't
want to loose that by mistake (or inconsiderate intent). So you'd want
to set in
Category: Session the option
Close window on exit to
Never.
Annoying PC bell.
Some systems have quite annoying (and loud) PC speaker bell sounds and
since I am not fond of audible notifications (and I can imagine my
colleagues even less when I frantically expand stuff in bash) I always
enable visual bell in
Category: Terminal > Bell and select
Visual bell.
I also like to have taskbar notifications (when eg. putty is minimized or in the background) so I set
Taskbar/caption indication on bell to
Flashing.
Increase scrollback buffer.
By default Putty buffers 200 lines of output, which is too little in
lots of circumstances. And the moment you actually need this number
increased, chances are you already lost some information you wanted. So
it is wise to increase this number. What I do is go to
Category: Window and increase
Lines of scrollback to
20000.
Scrollback behavior
One thing I hate about terminal consoles is that if you are scrolling
back output while the system is still producing output, the terminal
jumps back to the bottom. I can see why this is the default, people
might be confused if they are not aware that they are looking at the
terminal buffer.
So in
Category: Window I disable the
Reset scrollback on display activity but I do enable
Reset scrollback on keypress.
Choose a good font.
The newer Putty binaries are able to make use of ClearType which
drastically improves the font quality compared to Antialiased. Go to
Category: Window > Appearance, choose
ClearType and a nice font. I prefer
Lucida Console, 9-point.
When you are there, you might want to change the
Gap between text and window edge to
3 pixels.
Use proper character encoding.
Nowadays all Linux systems are able to use Unicode (UTF-8) so to make
sure that the output in Putty (especially everything non-ascii) looks
fine, go to
Category: Window > Translation and change the
character set to
UTF-8, make sure that also the line drawing characters use Unicode as well.
Linux copy-and-pasting.
I prefer to do an implicit copy when selecting and using the middle mouse button for pasting. So I go to
Category: Window > Selection and set the
Action of mouse buttons to
xterm (Right extends, Middle pastes)
When you are there, also enable the option
Paste to clipboard in RTF as well as plain text,
which is nice when you are copy-and-pasting to emails or text documents
that allow fonts and colours. Your console output will look much the
same as it does on your screen!
Change dark colours on a black background.
One of the more annoying things with terminal applications (xterm has
the same issue) is that by default dark-blue is too dark to be visible
on a black background. Not only is this frustrating, it makes the
experience for new users so bad that they prefer to disable colours (or
hate the ls colour output or syntax highlighting in vim).
So if you are like me, go to
Category: Window > Colours and select
ANSI Blue in the
Select a colour to adjust to
Red:74 Green:74 Blue:255. I do the same for
ANSI Blue Bold to
Red:140 Green:140 Blue:255.
Keeping idle sessions active.
Another frustrating problem is induced by the time-to-live of inactive
or idle TCP sessions on firewall or switch configurations. At some
companies this is put aggressively low so that TCP sessions that have no
activity for 1 minute or even 30 seconds are being dropped. If you are
using an SSH connection over such a network device, you have to take
care to send keep-alive packets over your idle session. To do this go to
Category: Connection and set
Seconds between keepalives (0 to turn off) to
25.
Enable X11 forwarding.
Together with
Xming,
Putty allows you to run graphical Linux applications on your Windows
system, so enabling X11 forwarding by default can be useful. To enable
this, got to:
Connection > SSH > X11 and enable
Enable X11 forwarding.
Also dynamic forwarding is very useful to connect to systems on a
remote network, even when you do not know in advance having it enabled
can be useful. This option however reserves a local port on the system
so enabling it by default is not really practical. However you can still
enable it from a running Putty by selecting
Change settings.
Finally, saving the default.
Now, don't forget to save the changes you just made to the default
template. If you loaded the Default Settings at the start, return back
to
Category: Session and press the
Save button. Now you are done !
Putty settings summary.
Category: Session
Connection type: SSH
Close window on exit: Never
Category: Terminal > Bell
Action to happen when a bell occurs: Visual bell (flash window)
Taskbar/caption indication: Flashing
Category: Window
Lines of scrollback: 20000
Reset scrollback on keypress: Checked
Reset scrollback on display activity: Unchecked
Category: Window > Appearance
Font: Lucida Console, 9-point
Font quality: ClearType
Gap between text and window edge: 3
Category: Window > Translation
Character set: UTF-8
Handling of line drawing characters: Unicode
Category: Window > Selection
Action of mouse buttons: xterm (Right extends, Middle pastes)
Paste to clipboard in RTF as well as plain text: enabled
Category: Window > Colours
ANSI Blue: Red:74 Green:74 Blue:255
ANSI Blue Bold: Red:140: Green:140 Blue:255
Category: Connection
Seconds between keepalives (0 to turn off): 25
Category: Connection > SSH > X11
Enable X11 forwarding: enabled
Observação 
