In this article, I will provide a detailed guide on Useful PuTTY Configuration settings. We’ll walk you through each step of the process with proper screenshots.
Putty allows you to connect to remote computers/devices/servers using various protocols such as secure socket shell (SSH), Telnet, serial and more. PuTTY is the preferred choice for system administrators, network engineers, and developers to manage remote systems. If you do not know how to download and install Putty then you can follow my article on How to set up Putty in Virtualbox.
Let’s learn some useful putty configuration tips and tricks:
Table of Contents
1. Load, save, or delete PUTTY sessions:
SAVE SESSION: First type the server IP address.After that provide the saved session name(Any name) and click on the Save button to save the putty session.
DELETE SESSION: First select the session from the saved sessions that you want to delete and then click the delete button to delete the session.
LOAD SESSION: If you want to load any saved session then select the session first and after that click on the Load button to load the session. Once you load the session, you will see the IP address of the selected session.
2. Enable Putty session Logging: You can store your session putty output to file which can be viewed later for a different purpose. To enable it, first select Logging and click on All session output. Now you have to select the location to store the output log by clicking on Browse.
3. Increase lines of scrollback: By default, putty keeps 2000 lines of text. It means when you try to display log history putty only keeps 2000 lines of it in the Windows buffer for us to scroll back and see. To increase the scrollback buffer size, we can increase the value Lines of scrollback. I have increased it to 999999.
4. Putty font settings: Change the appearance of font, font style, and font size in putty. Under the window section, Click on Appearance and after that click on Change (under Font settings).
Now you can select any Font, Font style and size as per your requirement.Once done click on Ok button.
5. Formatting of copied characters: In PuTTY, enabling this option preserves text formatting in “Rich Text Format” (RTF) when copied to the clipboard. This means when pasted into a word processor, colors, formatting, and styles are retained exactly as they appear in PuTTY. To enable this select copy under selection(under window) and select copy to clipboard in RTF as well as plain text:
6. Putty foreground color change: If you want to change the foreground color of putty, select colors under selection, and after that select Default foreground. Click on Modify to select the color and once done click on ok.
7. Putty background color change: If you want to change the color of putty, select colors under selection and then select Default background. Click on Modify to select the color and once done click on ok.
8. Putty keepalives setting: You can configure keepalives to send periodic null packets, maintaining the connection so that you will never encounter a ‘Connection reset by peer‘ error in putty:
9. Putty auto-login username setup: when you set up an auto-login username for any session, you do not have to put the username for that session next time. To do that select Data under Connection and provide the Auto-login username.
Once all is done save the session so that when you log in next time you do not have to change these settings for that particular session.
10. Change Settings: If you want to change any settings of any sessions/ saved sessions then Right-click on the putty title bar and click on change settings:
