2 September 2010

Setting the Defaults for PUTTY

Putty is is a great piece of software. Because it works and it’s free I find it installed on most corporate desktops as the default software for terminal client on Windows.1. Not many people seems to realise that Putty is highly customisable and has a number of features that will improve your working environment.

When putty starts….

When putty starts it uses the default configuration. But where does the default configuration come from ? And how can I set the default’s for every session. This is the standard opening screen for putty:

Standard Opening Screen for Putty

Standard Opening Screen for Putty

Lets change the default terminal length to 40 lines instead of 24. (A more detailed discussion for WHY you would do this in Setting the Terminal Window Length)

Changing putty default window length to 40 lines

Head down to the Window Category on the left, then click into the Rows and change the value from 20 to 40.

Set the terminal length to 40 lines

Set the terminal length to 40 lines

Now, in the Category Window, head up to Session, and then click on Default Settings.

Save the Default Setting

Save the Default Setting

Now click the SAVE button.

And then

From now on, everytime you open putty, the window will be forty lines long.

Just to be clear, anything that you change is any of the windows can be set as the default using this process.

Footnotes

  1. After all, Microsoft doesn’t supply any SSH in Windows or even telnet capability in Vista [back]

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About Greg Ferro
Greg is a Network and Security Architect / Designer / Engineer working freelance in the UK and worked for Resellers, DotCom's, Large Corporate's and Service Providers across a variety of products & Vendors. He prefers to work for end users, believes in the life cycle, total cost of ownership and that near enough is often good enough. He likes talking about himself in the first person to feel "royal", even when hosting the Packet Pushers Podcast on Data Networking. More about Greg at http://etherealmind.com/who-am-i/ and you can follow him on Twitter.

Comments

  1. dferry says:

    Hi,

    This is a great series of articles.

    I’d just like to mention that there is a addon called Putty CM which gives you posibility for tabs for each session. It allows you put the tabs side to side or on top of each other which for troubleshooting I find quite useful,.
    Give it a go. http://puttycm.free.fr/cms/

  2. Steve B says:

    Another thumbs up for Putty CM here – the tabs feature saves all sorts of confusion when troubleshooting some issues.

  3. michael says:

    - as always very useful info on your blog
    - 1+ putty cm

    another great feature to have configured by default is session logging – you can configure it with date and hostname placeholders – set it with “printable output” and “always append to the end of it” and always have an organized session history

  4. kicay says:

    I also add logging all session output to log file.

  5. vinayag says:

    after a hour i found from google, this useful link for changing & saving the default setttings.

    Thanks to author.

    Vinayag

Trackbacks

  1. [...] This post cov­ers sav­ing these default set­tings for every new con­nec­tion that you make with putty. Wrapup [...]

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