~#nixy

A tip for maximizing your efficiency with PuTTy on Windows.

I use Windows XP on my desktop workstations at home (Because I’m lazy) and at work (Because I have to), so my primary way of interfacing with Unix servers is through PuTTy and it’s tools. I have at least one terminal window open at any time of the day, so you may say that PuTTy is my most frequently used application ever. During the course of using PuTTy, I’ve been fed up with having to double-click on the putty icon, type the server name, then type my user name and then password. There has to be a more efficient way, I thought.

After experimenting a bit, I realized that putty takes roughly the same command line arguments as your run-of-the-mill ssh client on *nix, so I set it up to be as fast as when invoking ssh in a command line. Here is how you take advantage of that.

Walkthrough:

First, we’re going to set up your $PATH in Windows so that you can exec binaries from the PuTTY install directory.

1. Left-click on My Computer
2. Select “Properties”
3. Go to the “Advanced” tab
4. Click “Environment Variables” button
5. Scroll down to “Path” variable in “System Variables” field
6. Double-click “Path” variable
7. Append your PuTTy install directory to the “Variable value” field, for example “;C:\Program Files\PuTTy” to the end of the line. Remember the colon first – It’s important. There’s probably a better way of doing this, but I’ll correct that later.
8. Apply settings, get back to desktop.

Now we’re done with all of the configuration. What we’ve done, is to add the putty install directory to the places where Windows searches for executable files when you invoke them by name alone. This principle is exactly the same as in any *nix, except that Microsoft somehow decided a GUI was a good way to do this.

The whole point of this article is that the way I launch putty on my system, is type WIN+R and write “putty username@server.tld”. Now all that is needed for me, is to type my password – or gain instant access if I’m using key-based authentication (More about that in a later post).

Enjoy!