PuTTY has been my go-to SSH client on Windows for years but I’ve found that it does require a couple of tweaks to turn it into the (almost?) perfect SSH client. Below are some tweaks to improve PuTTY.
Display characters the way it’s meant
For years I’ve put up with PuTTY displaying certain accented characters or other symbols in a bad and nasty way. This will cause tools like aptitude and tmux to look really awful. It was not long ago that I found that this behavior could be fixed by setting the proper charset. Go to Window > Translation > Remote character set and change it to UTF-8. Lines drawn by tmux have never looked so good. It also removed an annoying display glitch I was having with irssi.
If this doesn’t work make sure Bash is set to use UTF-8 by adding
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
to your .bashrc.
More about setting up an UTF-8 environment.
Change the default font
By default PuTTY uses Courier New but I’m not really fond of it. Instead I use Consolas bold at 10pt. Using this font with these settings gives fuller text that’s better readable and nicer on the eyes. At least in my opinion.
Use PuTTYtray
I use PuTTYtray so I can set a transparent background. Just set alpha to 220 and the transparency is just perfect. PuTTYtray also has support for hiding your terminal in the system tray, but I personally don’t use that. If you don’t need either then I suppose standard PuTTY will be good enough. I do recommend to install PuTTY along side PuTTYtray though as it ships with some useful tools for key generation.
Change right mouse-button behavior
By default a click on the right mouse-button pastes anything you’ve got on your clipboard to the terminal. If you’re aware of this than it’s fine, but sometimes it can cause some inconvenience. Instead, change its behavior so a right mouse click will show a context menu which aside from pasting from the clipboard also adds some other useful shortcuts. You can find this setting under
Window > Selection > Action of mouse buttons and set it to Windows. The default is Compromise.
Full screen
If you use multiple screens (or not) you may already be resizing your terminal to fit the screen. Instead of full screen with the window border, title and scrollbar there’s also a full screen mode that removes this and uses the entire screen as your terminal space. To do this you need to enable this in
Window > Behaviour > Full screen on Alt-Enter. Doing so will let you use Alt + Enter to go to full screen.
Other settings?
In case I’ve missed any useful tweaks that improve usage of PuTTY I’d like to hear about them in the comments.
I was looking for transparency and this helped, thanks.