Pretty PuTTY – Better PuTTY Settings | Hacker News Reader

Pretty PuTTY – Better PuTTY Settings

github.com

65 pointsJacKTrocinskI53 comments

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.

I don’t have a problem with Solarized but I prefer a simple green on black scheme.

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.

I think it’s great too, but a lot of the community implementations somehow mess up the color codes in practice.

Nope, I personally thing Solarized looks horrible. I prefer more neutral colours. Things I do like: Monokai Pro, VS Code Dark+ theme.

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

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?

Thanks, here is the file or iTerm for instance: 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/42c2b7b1c5d737e260ca...

I wanted to like it, and it is pleasing to the eye but the low contrast drove me nuts

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.

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/40a35c07a32de16af9b2f79ca933...

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.

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.

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.

According to https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/b0o6... it's caused by KB4489868.

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-w...

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.

Anybody try mobixterm? It's my go to Windows terminal. It has cygwin and an x server all wrapped together. If you haven't tried it, you should.

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

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

I discovered that when I customized my settings and wanted to port my colors to another system

You guys should try this:

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.

But it has not the newest security fixes for putty :(

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

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

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.

I've been using this and seems to have all the functionality you'd want.

https://github.com/mintty/wsltty

Yes! The same can be said for git-bash which uses mintty and doesn’t require you to install a new operating system (almost).

Yes git-bash is really surprisingly good for a "by product".

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 ...

+1, this was secretly the type of reply I wanted ;)

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.

It does have paste by right click when you enable the QuickEdit mode in the Windows terminal. Also, then you can mouse-select stuff and hit Enter to copy.

And there is also a CTRL+SHIFT+C/V mode for copy paste in recent Windows versions

You can actually run X11 apps in WSL, you just need a Windows X11 server running and the right environment variables for WSL apps to find it. You can waste time running glxgears, xeyes and xclock "natively" on Windows!

I use VcXsrv and gnome-terminal since I do all my development in tmux/vim/zsh and the default WSL terminal is really bad. I made a shortcut that calls 'bash.exe -c "DISPLAY=:0 gnome-terminal"'.

I assume this would also work for konsole/terminator/etc. if you prefer those.

Oh, very nice, thanx for sharing.

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.

My preference for Windows SSH moved from PuTTY to MobaXterm https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/.

It's got a load of useful features, like tabbing, embedded X Servers, which makes things easier.

Oh wow. Great find. Thanks for the tip!

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

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?

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 (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.

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

AFAIK putty.exe is tiny, standalone and runs from a usb drive / dropbox directory / network folder /... and on all windows versions ever. Almost.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've switched to Mobaxterm; https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net.

It's not open source, but the free version has minimal limits and it's way easier to use and includes a portable version.

I like that I can pop open a local terminal and scp files from my windows drives. It also includes x-forwarding, although I mostly handle that with x2go.

Thanks, never heard about it. Features are interesting, definitely will try it.

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?

Just change "Font"="Consolas" to what you feel like in the .reg file?

Yes :)

> Seconds between keepalives set to 59

Why not 60?

Ugh. Bigger font design trends.

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