PuTTY Enhanced series

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

1) Click Translation

2) Then click here to show the character set drop down

3) Now select the character set you’d like to use. Be sure your computer supports the character set

4) Click Session to save the new settings

That’s it! The character set has been changed and saved

This is the end of the tutorial. You now know how to change the character settings in PuTTY

PuTTY Enhanced series

How to copy and paste to and from a PuTTY window

It may not be obvious to you, but it is possible to https://fastdot.com.au/cloud-hosting-servers/vmware-vps-hosting-linux/ 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

1) You’ll need to be logged in to a PuTTY session before you begin

2) 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

3) Simply click off of the selection to deselect it

4) Now, let’s paste the selection into another window. For this tutorial, we’ll just use a Notepad window that we already have open

5) 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

6) Right-click and Copy

7) Return to PuTTY

8) Simply right-click to paste

9) 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

10) Hold down ALT, then click and drag from the top left corner to the bottom right

11) Switch back to Notepad

12) 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

PuTTY Enhanced series

How to change the bell style and settings in PuTTY

A terminal bell is a sort of notification fastdot 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

1) Click Load

2) Then, go to Bell

3) First, you can set the style of the terminal bell

4) 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

5) Return to the Session panel

6) Be sure to Save your session, or else the settings won’t stick

Then, let’s test out the bell

7) 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

PuTTY Enhanced series

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

1) Once you have PuTTY open, load a session from the menu

2) Then, go to Appearance

The first settings here allow you to adjust the cursor’s appearance

3) The default is Block, but you can change it to one of the other two, if you want. We’ll pick Vertical line

4) Click this checkbox to make the cursor blink

5) Now, for the Font settings

6) Click Change…

7) Select a new font from the list. Only monospaced fonts will show up; these are fonts whose characters are all the same width

8) Change its style, or just leave it set to Regular

9) Adjust the size to something a bit bigger

10) Then, click OK

Notice… the font name and size listed here has changed

11) Mark this checkbox to hide the mouse pointer when typing

12) 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

13) To display a sunken edge border, click this checkbox

14) Now, go to Colours

Let’s change the background and foreground colors

15) Hit Modify

16) Choose a Basic color, or pick a custom color using the tool at right. Let’s use white

17) Click OK

18) Now, for the Foreground color

19) We’ll pick Black for this

Feel free to change any other colors you want

20) Now, return to the Session page

21) Save our changes to the session

22) 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

23) Log in

24) Test out a command

That’s it! You now know how to change PuTTY’s appearance

PuTTY Enhanced series

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

1) Type  ls -l /  to list the contents of the root directory. Remember — press Enter to execute a shell command

2) Now, type the command shown to list the contents of all directories contained by the home directory

3) Scroll up

Here is the command we just typed

Above that, the output of the previous command

4) 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

5) Let’s increase the size of the scroll buffer. Close this session and re-open PuTTY to the configuration window

6) Select the session from the list, then click Load

7) Then, go to Window

8) Enter a higher value for Lines of scrollback. We’ll change ours from 200 to 20000

9) Return to the Session category

10) Click Save

11) Finally, press Open

12) Now, log in normally, as seen earlier in this series

Once logged in, let’s test out the new scroll buffer size

13) 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

14) 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