Tag Archives: windows

PuTTY configuration

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PuTTY is a terminal emulator with a free software license, including an SSH client. While it has cross-platform ports, it’s used most frequently on Windows systems, because they otherwise lack a built-in terminal emulator that interoperates well with Unix-style TTY systems.

While it’s very popular and useful, PuTTY’s defaults are quite old, and are chosen for compatibility reasons rather than to take advantage of all the features of a more complete terminal emulator. For new users, this is likely an advantage as it can avoid confusion, but more advanced users who need to use a Windows client to connect to a modern GNU/Linux system may find the defaults frustrating, particularly when connecting to a more capable and custom-configured server.

Here are a few of the problems with the default configuration:

  • It identifies itself as an xterm(1), when terminfo(5) definitions are available named putty and putty-256color, which more precisely define what the terminal can and cannot do, and their various custom escape sequences.
  • It only allows 16 colors, where most modern terminals are capable of using 256; this is partly tied into the terminal type definition.
  • It doesn’t use UTF-8 by default, which should be used whenever possible for reasons of interoperability and compatibility, and is well-supported by modern locale definitions on GNU/Linux.
  • It uses Courier New, a workable but rather harsh monospace font, which should be swapped out for something more modern if available.
  • It uses audible terminal bells, which tend to be annoying.
  • Its default palette based on xterm(1) is rather garish and harsh; softer colors are more pleasant to read.

All of these things are fixable.

Terminal type

Usually the most important thing in getting a terminal working smoothly is to make sure it identifies itself correctly to the machine to which it’s connecting, using an appropriate $TERM string. By default, PuTTY identifies itself as an xterm(1) terminal emulator, which most systems will support.

However, there’s a terminfo(5) definition for putty and putty-256color available as part of ncurses, and if you have it available on your system then you should use it, as it slightly more precisely describes the features available to PuTTY as a terminal emulator.

You can check that you have the appropriate terminfo(5) definition installed by looking in /usr/share/terminfo/p:

$ ls -1 /usr/share/terminfo/p/putty*
/usr/share/terminfo/p/putty  
/usr/share/terminfo/p/putty-256color  
/usr/share/terminfo/p/putty-sco  
/usr/share/terminfo/p/putty-vt100

On Debian and Ubuntu systems, these files can be installed with:

# apt-get install ncurses-term

If you can’t install the files via your system’s package manager, you can also keep a private repository of terminfo(5) files in your home directory, in a directory called .terminfo:

$ ls -1 $HOME/.terminfo/p
putty
putty-256color

Once you have this definition installed, you can instruct PuTTY to identify with that $TERM string in the Connection > Data section:

Correct terminal definition in PuTTY

Here, I’ve used putty-256color; if you don’t need or want a 256 color terminal you could just use putty.

Once connected, make sure that your $TERM string matches what you specified, and hasn’t been mangled by any of your shell or terminal configurations:

$ echo $TERM
putty-256color

Color space

Certain command line applications like Vim and Tmux can take advantage of a full 256 colors in the terminal. If you’d like to use this, set PuTTY’s $TERM string to putty-256color as outlined above, and select Allow terminal to use xterm 256-colour mode in Window > Colours:

256 colours in PuTTY

You can test this is working by using a 256 color application, or by trying out the terminal colours directly in your shell using tput:

$ for ((color = 0; color <= 255; color++)); do
> tput setaf "$color"
> printf "test"
> done

If you see the word test in many different colors, then things are probably working. Type reset to fix your terminal after this:

$ reset

Using UTF-8

If you’re connecting to a modern GNU/Linux system, it’s likely that you’re using a UTF-8 locale. You can check which one by typing locale. In my case, I’m using the en_NZ locale with UTF-8 character encoding:

$ locale
LANG=en_NZ.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_NZ:en
LC_CTYPE="en_NZ.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_NZ.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_NZ.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_NZ.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_NZ.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_NZ.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_NZ.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_NZ.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_NZ.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_NZ.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_NZ.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_NZ.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

If the output of locale does show you’re using a UTF-8 character encoding, then you should configure PuTTY to interpret terminal output using that character set; it can’t detect it automatically (which isn’t PuTTY’s fault; it’s a known hard problem). You do this in the Window > Translation section:

Using UTF-8 encoding in PuTTY

While you’re in this section, it’s best to choose the Use Unicode line drawing code points option as well. Line-drawing characters are most likely to work properly with this setting for UTF-8 locales and modern fonts:

Using Unicode line-drawing points in PuTTY

If Unicode and its various encodings is new to you, I highly recommend Joel Spolsky’s classic article about what programmers should know about both.

Fonts

Courier New is a workable monospace font, but modern Windows systems include Consolas, a much nicer terminal font. You can change this in the Window > Appearance section:

Using Consolas font in PuTTY

There’s no reason you can’t use another favourite Bitmap or TrueType font instead once it’s installed on your system; DejaVu Sans Mono, Inconsolata, and Terminus are popular alternatives. I personally favor Ubuntu Mono.

Bells

Terminal bells by default in PuTTY emit the system alert sound. Most people find this annoying; some sort of visual bell tends to be much better if you want to use the bell at all. Configure this in Terminal > Bell:

Using taskbar bell in PuTTY

Given the purpose of the alert is to draw attention to the window, I find that using a flashing taskbar icon works well; I use this to draw my attention to my prompt being displayed after a long task completes, or if someone mentions my name or directly messages me in irssi(1).

Another option is using the Visual bell (flash window) option, but I personally find this even worse than the audible bell.

Default palette

The default colours for PuTTY are rather like those used in xterm(1), and hence rather harsh, particularly if you’re used to the slightly more subdued colorscheme of terminal emulators like gnome-terminal(1), or have customized your palette to something like Solarized.

If you have decimal RGB values for the colours you’d prefer to use, you can enter those in the Window > Colours section, making sure that Use system colours and Attempt to use logical palettes are unchecked:

Defining colorschemes in PuTTY

There are a few other default annoyances in PuTTY, but the above are the ones that seem to annoy advanced users most frequently. Dag Wieers has a similar post with a few more defaults to fix.

Buffers, windows, and tabs

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If you’ve moved to Vim from an editor like Notepad++ or TextMate, you’ll be used to working with the idea of tabs in a text editor in a certain way. Specifically, a tab represents an open file; while the tab’s there, you’ve got an open file, as soon as you close it, it goes away. This one-to-one correspondence is pretty straightforward and is analogous to using tabs in a web browser; while the page is open, there’s a tab there, and you have one page per tab, and one tab per page.

Vim has a system for tabs as well, but it works in a completely different way from how text editors and browsers do. Beginners with Vim are often frustrated by this because the model for tabs is used so consistently in pretty much every other program they’re accustomed to, and they might end up spending a lot of fruitless time trying to force Vim to follow the same model through its configuration.

I think a good way to understand the differences in concept and usage between Vim’s three levels of view abstraction — buffers, windows, and tabs — is to learn how to use each from the ground up. So let’s start with buffers.

Buffers

A buffer in Vim is probably best thought of for most users as an open instance of a file, that may not necessarily be visible on the current screen. There’s probably a more accurate technical definition as a buffer need not actually correspond to a file on your disk, but it’ll work for our purposes.

When you open a single file in Vim, that file gets put into a buffer, and it’s the only buffer there on startup. If this buffer is unmodified (or if you’re using hidden), and you open another file with :edit, that buffer goes into the background and you start working with the new file. The previous buffer only goes away when you explicitly delete it with a call to :quit or :bdelete, and even then it’s still recoverable unless you do :bwipe.

By default, a buffer can only be in the background like this if it’s unmodified. You can remove this restriction if you like with the :set hidden option.

You can get a quick list of the buffers open in a Vim session with :ls. This all means that when most people think of tabs in more familiar text editors, the idea of a buffer in Vim is actually closest to what they’re thinking.

Windows

A window in Vim is a viewport onto a single buffer. When you open a new window with :split or :vsplit, you can include a filename in the call. This opens the file in a new buffer, and then opens a new window as a view onto it. A buffer can be viewed in multiple windows within a single Vim session; you could have a hundred windows editing the same buffer if you wanted to.

Windows in Vim

Vim Session with multiple windows open, both horizontally and vertically.

Tabs

Finally, a tab in Vim is a collection of one or more windows. The best way to think of tabs, therefore, is as enabling you to group windows usefully. For example, if you were working on code for both a client program and a server program, you could have the files for the client program open in the first tab, perhaps in three or four windows, and the files for the server program open in another, which could be, say, seven windows. You can then flick back and forth between the tabs using :tabn and :tabp.

Tab usage in Vim

Two tabs open in Vim, each with multiple windows. Move between two tabs with :tabn and :tabp.

This model of buffers, windows, and tabs is quite a bit more intricate than in other editors, and the terms are sometimes confusing. However, if you know a bit about how they’re supposed to work, you get a great deal more control over the layout of your editing sessions as a result. Personally, I find I rarely need tabs as with a monitor of sufficient size it suffices to keep two or three windows open at a time when working on sets of files, but on the odd occasion I do need tabs, I do find them tremendously useful.

Thanks to Hacker News users anonymous and m0shen for pointing out potential confusion with the :set hidden option and the :bdelete command.