7 ms·

Pretty PuTTY – Better PuTTY Settings

65 points by JacKTrocinskI 8y ago

grenoire 8y ago
Putty definitely requires you to edit its default settings, but I was in general really surprised at the level of control you have (on a Windows application). Side note: Am I in the minority for disliking how Solarized looks? It's so damn popular but I really can't seem to find its appeal.
- Crontab 8y ago
  I don’t have a problem with Solarized but I prefer a simple green on black scheme.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Voice for Solarized: I use it everywhere, because it’s popular, consistent, and not horrible to look at. This means I can have essentially the same color scheme everywhere, which is nice, plus the light/dark themes are very easy to make (which, conveniently, reduces the amount of syntax highlighting CSS on my website quite a bit: the only thing I need to have “dark mode” is changing the background color). I’m not completely sold on the “algorithmically perfected, better for your eyes, etc.” stuff but I do think it’s not horrible, which is not a guarantee I can make about $DEFAULT_COLOR_SCHEME_FOR_RANDOM_EDITOR.
  - pletnes 8y ago
    I think it’s great too, but a lot of the community implementations somehow mess up the color codes in practice.
- antihero 8y ago
  Nope, I personally thing Solarized looks horrible. I prefer more neutral colours. Things I do like: Monokai Pro, VS Code Dark+ theme.
- the_pwner224 8y ago
  I'm not a fan of Solarized either, but really like Gruvbox. It is somewhat similar to Solarized, but with plenty of contrast and a not-blue dark background. https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox But looking back at Solarized, I can't see why I used to dislike it so much (low contrast) - perhaps it's because I now have a HiDPI screen which can more precisely render the text apart from the background?
  - aboutruby 8y ago
    Thanks, here is the file or iTerm for instance: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/morhetz/gruvbox-contrib/master/iterm2/gruvbox-dark.itermcolors https://raw.githubusercontent.com/morhetz/gruvbox-contrib/ma... Tried it but much too pale for me, I use iTerm's default dark colors + a fix for a lighter dark blue: https://gist.github.com/localhostdotdev/42c2b7b1c5d737e260ca2da10f82e22c https://gist.github.com/localhostdotdev/42c2b7b1c5d737e260ca...
- jacobush 8y ago
  I wanted to like it, and it is pleasing to the eye but the low contrast drove me nuts
- bloopernova 8y ago
  I used to use Solarized everywhere, and it's still my fallback. I like its consistent colours, and I use the darker colours as my wallpaper on my desktop/laptop. I've switched to using One Dark in my editors though, it feels slightly easier on my (aging!) eyes. A lot of people use Solarized, I think, because they are not happy with the defaults, and Solarized is very well put together. So when people see the new colours available to them, they think "this is great! I should use this everywhere!" and thus it gets potentially way overused.
navaati 8y ago
TIL that Putty's settings are stored in the Registry…
- tsukurimashou 8y ago
  I discovered that when I customized my settings and wanted to port my colors to another system
  - fb03 8y ago
    You guys should try this: http://www.9bis.net/kitty/ http://www.9bis.net/kitty/ it's a fork of PuTTY with a portable mode which stores everything inside a .ini file. It's amazingly easy to move/backup/etc.
    - dod9er 8y ago
      But it has not the newest security fixes for putty :(
      - 24gttghh 8y ago
        PuTTY was only updated 6 days ago...so I don't find that terribly worrying for a fork. The update history for KiTTY seems to imply it would get updated soon.[0] e.g. the .69 and .70 updates were merged within a few weeks the last time... [0]http://www.9bis.net/kitty/?action=news&zone=en http://www.9bis.net/kitty/?action=news&zone=en
- m0nty 8y ago
  You can use Putty Portable, without installing the whole PortableApps suite, and get settings in files rather than registry. https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/putty_portable https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/putty_portable
xurukefi 8y ago
I found that the `putty-256color` terminal does not really work well with utilities using more advanced TUIs such as ncurses.
- thristian 8y ago
  The `putty-256color` terminal description (like most terminal descriptions) is hand-made by the ncurses maintainer, for maximum compatibility with ncurses. What problems have you encountered?
  - xurukefi 8y ago
    When i use the `ncdu` utility for example it does not highlight selected entries when using `putty-256color`. Example: https://i.imgur.com/ZibnkOm.png https://i.imgur.com/ZibnkOm.png (left `putty-256color`, right `xterm`). Maybe this is a shortcoming of the `ncdu` utility or an issue with some of my other putty settings. I never tried to pinpoint it as it doesn't really affect most of the terminal work I do.
spacenick88 8y ago
I really don't use Windows all that often but when I do I now really prefer to use WSL and a proper OpenSSH or mosh. Even running in the default Terminal it's still nicer than PuTTY, if I have the choice though (and when the next version fixes input of AltGr (does not apply to US keyboards)) I prefer to use the Windows version of alacritty.
- sp332 8y ago
  The latest Windows update (last week) broke the ssh-agent in WSL. The ssh client will bluescreen your PC if you make a connection with a key loaded into the agent.
  - nikomen 8y ago
    Is it broken in the latest stable release (1809) or preview release (1903)? Anecdotally, I'm running the latest preview release and ssh within WSL is functioning. My ssh-agent does load a key when starting WSL and asks for a password for the key.
    - sp332 8y ago
      According to https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/b0o6v6/after_update_ssh_to_remote_hosts_cause_blue_screen/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/b0o6... it's caused by KB4489868.
- signal11 8y ago
  Worth noting that historically the Windows console’s colours were pretty terrible for people used to Linux consoles. There’s a fix which works since late 2017, which is to run colortool[1]. [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/introducing-the-windows-console-colortool/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/introducing-the-w...
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Also, in Windows Features you can install OpenSSH directly as a feature on Windows and get "real" ssh even in CMD.EXE and PowerShell terminals.
teekert 8y ago
If Ubuntu on WSL would have paste by right/middle click and copy on select (or better if Windows had this in general!) I wouldn't use putty anymore. Still a nice terminal is very welcome, a good dropdown terminal (with bash/wsl, not powershell) would be really really great.
- 013 8y ago
  I've been using this and seems to have all the functionality you'd want. https://github.com/mintty/wsltty https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
  - pletnes 8y ago
    Yes! The same can be said for git-bash which uses mintty and doesn’t require you to install a new operating system (almost).
    - teekert 8y ago
      Yes git-bash is really surprisingly good for a "by product".
  - swish_bob 8y ago
    Ooh, thanks. Been using mintty on Cygwin for ages, this might be what I need to stop looking at WSL and start using it as my default ...
  - teekert 8y ago
    +1, this was secretly the type of reply I wanted ;)
- bloopernova 8y ago
  Another vote for WSLTTY. It's slower than the Ubuntu terminal (which is insanely quick) but it supports way more of what you expect if you are used to iTerm2 or X11 terminals.
- rndgermandude 8y ago
rk06 8y ago
Can anyone tell me what are the advantages of putty over ssh (from gitbash or openssh wsl)?
- pletnes 8y ago
  AFAIK putty.exe is tiny, standalone and runs from a usb drive / dropbox directory / network folder /... and on all windows versions ever. Almost.
- fibo 8y ago
  As far as I know, gitbash uses a dumb terminal. You will have issues with features like readline, UTF8 chars and so on. Putty is a standard Terminal emulator.
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  Putty is a standard Windows application with good GUI and proper integrations. I prefer good GUI apps whenever possible. Not sure of any particular advantage, but terminal is definitely better with putty.
  - pricecomstock 8y ago
    PuTTY definitely works well but calling the GUI "good" might be a stretch. It's pretty unintuitive. As a quick example, I'm always feel like clicking "save" is going to save over the highlighted session settings instead of inserting the new session name I've typed in the box. Also in general changing settings is clunky enough that this post is about a tool that edits the registry directly so that you don't have to change settings through the GUI.
    - vbezhenar 8y ago
      I agree but that's pretty small issue and it's easy to use once you understood it. Another issue is that I always forgetting where default username is located (it's in Connection\Data). But overall it's usable and it's much faster to navigate in GUI rather than reading ssh manual, especially when you need that option once in a few years.
jrochkind1 8y ago
The font in those screenshots still seems pretty terrible to me. Does putty let you choose your own font? I know I've seen some fine font-rendering in some Windows apps, is there any reason certain apps would not render as smooth glyphs as the best?
- tapland 8y ago
  Just change "Font"="Consolas" to what you feel like in the .reg file?
  - JacKTrocinskI 8y ago
    Yes :)
fibo 8y ago
I also wrote an article with my Putty settings: http://g14n.info/2014/06/my-putty-settings/ http://g14n.info/2014/06/my-putty-settings/
shoover 8y ago
I spent some time recently cleaning up my Putty sessions. My goal was to control all colors in the Putty settings and have everything look good with tmux, bash, and emacs out of the box. The result was basically what the OP arrived at. It works well as long as the Putty and tmux terminal types match (e.g. putty-256color and tmux-256color, respectively) with the exception of emacs isearch highlighting, which has bad contrasting defaults that also obscure the foreground text of the current match (why do we even bother with cyan and magenta?). Here's a Ruby script that may be of use to paint over existing sessions using various color schemes gathered from around github and translated to Ruby data. https://gist.github.com/shoover/40a35c07a32de16af9b2f79ca933f4ac https://gist.github.com/shoover/40a35c07a32de16af9b2f79ca933...
nailer 8y ago
Putty was great in 2005, but Windows now includes OpenSSH as part of the OS. Combine that with Fluent Terminal, Hyper 3 Canary or Terminus (or maybe alacritty if you have a tabbed WM) and you can have a much better terminal than what Putty provides.
nyuszika7h 8y ago
> Seconds between keepalives set to 59 Why not 60?
kaetemi 8y ago
Ugh. Bigger font design trends.
raesene9 8y ago
My preference for Windows SSH moved from PuTTY to MobaXterm https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/. It's got a load of useful features, like tabbing, embedded X Servers, which makes things easier.
- nzjrs 8y ago
  Oh wow. Great find. Thanks for the tip!

65 points by JacKTrocinskI 8y ago

Putty definitely requires you to edit its default settings, but I was in general really surprised at the level of control you have (on a Windows application). Side note: Am I in the minority for disliking how Solarized looks? It's so damn popular but I really can't seem to find its appeal.

Crontab 8y ago
I don’t have a problem with Solarized but I prefer a simple green on black scheme.
saagarjha 8y ago
Voice for Solarized: I use it everywhere, because it’s popular, consistent, and not horrible to look at. This means I can have essentially the same color scheme everywhere, which is nice, plus the light/dark themes are very easy to make (which, conveniently, reduces the amount of syntax highlighting CSS on my website quite a bit: the only thing I need to have “dark mode” is changing the background color). I’m not completely sold on the “algorithmically perfected, better for your eyes, etc.” stuff but I do think it’s not horrible, which is not a guarantee I can make about $DEFAULT_COLOR_SCHEME_FOR_RANDOM_EDITOR.
- pletnes 8y ago
  I think it’s great too, but a lot of the community implementations somehow mess up the color codes in practice.
antihero 8y ago
Nope, I personally thing Solarized looks horrible. I prefer more neutral colours. Things I do like: Monokai Pro, VS Code Dark+ theme.
the_pwner224 8y ago
I'm not a fan of Solarized either, but really like Gruvbox. It is somewhat similar to Solarized, but with plenty of contrast and a not-blue dark background. https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox But looking back at Solarized, I can't see why I used to dislike it so much (low contrast) - perhaps it's because I now have a HiDPI screen which can more precisely render the text apart from the background?
- aboutruby 8y ago
  Thanks, here is the file or iTerm for instance: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/morhetz/gruvbox-contrib/master/iterm2/gruvbox-dark.itermcolors https://raw.githubusercontent.com/morhetz/gruvbox-contrib/ma... Tried it but much too pale for me, I use iTerm's default dark colors + a fix for a lighter dark blue: https://gist.github.com/localhostdotdev/42c2b7b1c5d737e260ca2da10f82e22c https://gist.github.com/localhostdotdev/42c2b7b1c5d737e260ca...
jacobush 8y ago
I wanted to like it, and it is pleasing to the eye but the low contrast drove me nuts
bloopernova 8y ago
I used to use Solarized everywhere, and it's still my fallback. I like its consistent colours, and I use the darker colours as my wallpaper on my desktop/laptop. I've switched to using One Dark in my editors though, it feels slightly easier on my (aging!) eyes. A lot of people use Solarized, I think, because they are not happy with the defaults, and Solarized is very well put together. So when people see the new colours available to them, they think "this is great! I should use this everywhere!" and thus it gets potentially way overused.

navaati 8y ago

TIL that Putty's settings are stored in the Registry…

tsukurimashou 8y ago
I discovered that when I customized my settings and wanted to port my colors to another system
- fb03 8y ago
  You guys should try this: http://www.9bis.net/kitty/ http://www.9bis.net/kitty/ it's a fork of PuTTY with a portable mode which stores everything inside a .ini file. It's amazingly easy to move/backup/etc.
  - dod9er 8y ago
    But it has not the newest security fixes for putty :(
    - 24gttghh 8y ago
      PuTTY was only updated 6 days ago...so I don't find that terribly worrying for a fork. The update history for KiTTY seems to imply it would get updated soon.[0] e.g. the .69 and .70 updates were merged within a few weeks the last time... [0]http://www.9bis.net/kitty/?action=news&zone=en http://www.9bis.net/kitty/?action=news&zone=en
m0nty 8y ago
You can use Putty Portable, without installing the whole PortableApps suite, and get settings in files rather than registry. https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/putty_portable https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/putty_portable

xurukefi 8y ago

I found that the `putty-256color` terminal does not really work well with utilities using more advanced TUIs such as ncurses.

thristian 8y ago
The `putty-256color` terminal description (like most terminal descriptions) is hand-made by the ncurses maintainer, for maximum compatibility with ncurses. What problems have you encountered?
- xurukefi 8y ago
  When i use the `ncdu` utility for example it does not highlight selected entries when using `putty-256color`. Example: https://i.imgur.com/ZibnkOm.png https://i.imgur.com/ZibnkOm.png (left `putty-256color`, right `xterm`). Maybe this is a shortcoming of the `ncdu` utility or an issue with some of my other putty settings. I never tried to pinpoint it as it doesn't really affect most of the terminal work I do.

spacenick88 8y ago

I really don't use Windows all that often but when I do I now really prefer to use WSL and a proper OpenSSH or mosh. Even running in the default Terminal it's still nicer than PuTTY, if I have the choice though (and when the next version fixes input of AltGr (does not apply to US keyboards)) I prefer to use the Windows version of alacritty.

sp332 8y ago
The latest Windows update (last week) broke the ssh-agent in WSL. The ssh client will bluescreen your PC if you make a connection with a key loaded into the agent.
- nikomen 8y ago
  Is it broken in the latest stable release (1809) or preview release (1903)? Anecdotally, I'm running the latest preview release and ssh within WSL is functioning. My ssh-agent does load a key when starting WSL and asks for a password for the key.
  - sp332 8y ago
    According to https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/b0o6v6/after_update_ssh_to_remote_hosts_cause_blue_screen/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/b0o6... it's caused by KB4489868.
signal11 8y ago
Worth noting that historically the Windows console’s colours were pretty terrible for people used to Linux consoles. There’s a fix which works since late 2017, which is to run colortool[1]. [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/introducing-the-windows-console-colortool/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/introducing-the-w...
WorldMaker 8y ago
Also, in Windows Features you can install OpenSSH directly as a feature on Windows and get "real" ssh even in CMD.EXE and PowerShell terminals.

teekert 8y ago

If Ubuntu on WSL would have paste by right/middle click and copy on select (or better if Windows had this in general!) I wouldn't use putty anymore. Still a nice terminal is very welcome, a good dropdown terminal (with bash/wsl, not powershell) would be really really great.

013 8y ago
I've been using this and seems to have all the functionality you'd want. https://github.com/mintty/wsltty https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
- pletnes 8y ago
  Yes! The same can be said for git-bash which uses mintty and doesn’t require you to install a new operating system (almost).
  - teekert 8y ago
    Yes git-bash is really surprisingly good for a "by product".
- swish_bob 8y ago
  Ooh, thanks. Been using mintty on Cygwin for ages, this might be what I need to stop looking at WSL and start using it as my default ...
- teekert 8y ago
  +1, this was secretly the type of reply I wanted ;)
bloopernova 8y ago
Another vote for WSLTTY. It's slower than the Ubuntu terminal (which is insanely quick) but it supports way more of what you expect if you are used to iTerm2 or X11 terminals.
rndgermandude 8y ago

rk06 8y ago

Can anyone tell me what are the advantages of putty over ssh (from gitbash or openssh wsl)?

pletnes 8y ago
AFAIK putty.exe is tiny, standalone and runs from a usb drive / dropbox directory / network folder /... and on all windows versions ever. Almost.
fibo 8y ago
As far as I know, gitbash uses a dumb terminal. You will have issues with features like readline, UTF8 chars and so on. Putty is a standard Terminal emulator.
vbezhenar 8y ago
Putty is a standard Windows application with good GUI and proper integrations. I prefer good GUI apps whenever possible. Not sure of any particular advantage, but terminal is definitely better with putty.
- pricecomstock 8y ago
  PuTTY definitely works well but calling the GUI "good" might be a stretch. It's pretty unintuitive. As a quick example, I'm always feel like clicking "save" is going to save over the highlighted session settings instead of inserting the new session name I've typed in the box. Also in general changing settings is clunky enough that this post is about a tool that edits the registry directly so that you don't have to change settings through the GUI.
  - vbezhenar 8y ago
    I agree but that's pretty small issue and it's easy to use once you understood it. Another issue is that I always forgetting where default username is located (it's in Connection\Data). But overall it's usable and it's much faster to navigate in GUI rather than reading ssh manual, especially when you need that option once in a few years.

jrochkind1 8y ago

The font in those screenshots still seems pretty terrible to me. Does putty let you choose your own font? I know I've seen some fine font-rendering in some Windows apps, is there any reason certain apps would not render as smooth glyphs as the best?

tapland 8y ago
Just change "Font"="Consolas" to what you feel like in the .reg file?
- JacKTrocinskI 8y ago
  Yes :)

fibo 8y ago

I also wrote an article with my Putty settings: http://g14n.info/2014/06/my-putty-settings/ http://g14n.info/2014/06/my-putty-settings/

shoover 8y ago

I spent some time recently cleaning up my Putty sessions. My goal was to control all colors in the Putty settings and have everything look good with tmux, bash, and emacs out of the box. The result was basically what the OP arrived at. It works well as long as the Putty and tmux terminal types match (e.g. putty-256color and tmux-256color, respectively) with the exception of emacs isearch highlighting, which has bad contrasting defaults that also obscure the foreground text of the current match (why do we even bother with cyan and magenta?). Here's a Ruby script that may be of use to paint over existing sessions using various color schemes gathered from around github and translated to Ruby data. https://gist.github.com/shoover/40a35c07a32de16af9b2f79ca933f4ac https://gist.github.com/shoover/40a35c07a32de16af9b2f79ca933...

nailer 8y ago

Putty was great in 2005, but Windows now includes OpenSSH as part of the OS. Combine that with Fluent Terminal, Hyper 3 Canary or Terminus (or maybe alacritty if you have a tabbed WM) and you can have a much better terminal than what Putty provides.

nyuszika7h 8y ago

> Seconds between keepalives set to 59 Why not 60?

kaetemi 8y ago

Ugh. Bigger font design trends.

raesene9 8y ago

My preference for Windows SSH moved from PuTTY to MobaXterm https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/. It's got a load of useful features, like tabbing, embedded X Servers, which makes things easier.

nzjrs 8y ago
Oh wow. Great find. Thanks for the tip!