Add a new chapter full of intermediate-useful-things, somewhere

[sgt/putty] / doc / using.but

\versionid $Id: using.but,v 1.1 2001/11/25 18:59:12 simon Exp $

\C{using} Using PuTTY

This chapter provides a general introduction to some more advanced
features of PuTTY. For extreme detail and reference purposes,
\k{config} is likely to contain more information.

\H{using-session} During your session

A lot of PuTTY's complexity and features are in the configuration
panel. Once you have worked your way through that and started
a session, things should be reasonably simple after that.
Nevertheless, there are a few more useful features available.

\S{using-selection} Copying and pasting text

Often in a PuTTY session you will find text on your terminal screen
which you want to type in again. Like most other terminal emulators,
PuTTY allows you to copy and paste the text rather than having to
type it again. Also, copy and paste uses the Windows clipboard, so
that you can paste (for example) URLs into a web browser, or paste
from a word processor or spreadsheet into your terminal session.

PuTTY's copy and paste works entirely with the mouse. In order to
copy text to the clipboard, you just click the left mouse button in
the terminal window, and drag to select text. When you let go of the
button, the text is \e{automatically} copied to the clipboard. You
do not need to press Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Ins; in fact, if you do press
Ctrl-C, PuTTY will send a Ctrl-C character down your session to the
server where it will probably cause a process to be interrupted.

Pasting is done using the right button (or the middle mouse button,
if you have a three-button mouse and have set it up; see
\k{config-mouse}). When you click the right mouse button, PuTTY will
read whatever is in the Windows Clipboard and paste it into your
session, \e{exactly} as if it had been typed at the keyboard.
(Therefore, be careful of pasting formatted text into an editor that
does automatic indenting; you may find that the spaces pasted from
the clipboard plus the spaces added by the editor add up to too many
spaces and ruin the formatting. There is nothing PuTTY can do about
this.)

If you double-click the left mouse button, PuTTY will select a whole
word. If you double-click, hold down the second click, and drag the
mouse, PuTTY will select a sequence of whole words. If you
\e{triple}-click, or triple-click and drag, then PuTTY will select a
whole line or sequence of lines.

If you want to select a rectangular region instead of selecting to
the end of each line, you can do this by holding down Alt when you
make your selection. (You can also configure rectangular selection
to be the default, and then holding down Alt gives the normal
behaviour instead. See \#{FIXME} for details.)

If you have a middle mouse button, then you can use it to adjust an
existing selection if you selected something slightly wrong. (If you
have configured the middle mouse button to paste, then the right
mouse button does this instead.) Click the button on the screen, and
you can pick up the nearest end of the selection and drag it to
somewhere else.

\S{using-scrollback} Scrolling the screen back

PuTTY keeps track of text that has scrolled up off the top of the
terminal. So if something appears on the screen that you want to
read, but it scrolls too fast and it's gone by the time you try to
look for it, you can use the scrollbar on the right side of the
window to look back up the session history and find it again.

As well as using the scrollbar, you can also page the scrollback up
and down by pressing Shift-PgUp and Shift-PgDn. These are still
available if you configure the scrollbar to be invisible.

By default the last 200 lines scrolled off the top are
preserved for you to look at. You can increase (or decrease) this
value using the configuration box; see \k{config-scrollback}.

\S{using-sysmenu} The System menu

If you click the left mouse button on the icon in the top left
corner of PuTTY's window, or click the right mouse button on the
title bar, you will see the standard Windows system menu containing
items like Minimise, Move, Size and Close.

PuTTY's system menu contains extra program features in addition to
the Windows standard options. These extra menu commands are
described below.

\S2{using-eventlog} The PuTTY Event Log

If you choose \q{Event Log} from the system menu, a small window
will pop up in which PuTTY logs significant events during the
connection. Most of the events in the log will probably take place
during session startup, but a few can occur at any point in the
session, and one or two occur right at the end.

You can use the mouse to select one or more lines of the Event Log,
and hit the Copy button to copy them to the clipboard. If you are
reporting a bug, it's often useful to paste the contents of the
Event Log into your bug report.

\S2{using-newsession} Starting new sessions

PuTTY's system menu provides some shortcut ways to start new
sessions:

\b Selecting \q{New Session} will start a completely new instance of
PuTTY, and bring up the configuration box as normal.

\b Selecting \q{Duplicate Session} will start a session with
precisely the same options as your current one - connecting to the
same host using the same protocol, with all the same terminal
settings and everything.

\b The \q{Saved Sessions} submenu gives you quick access to any
sets of stored session details you have previously saved. See
\k{config-saving} for details of how to create saved sessions.

\S2{using-changesettings} Changing your session settings

If you select \q{Change Settings} from the system menu, PuTTY will
display a cut-down version of its initial configuration box. This
allows you to adjust most properties of your current session. You
can change the terminal size, the font, the actions of various
keypresses, the colours, and so on.

Some of the options that are available in the main configuration box
are not shown in the cut-down Change Settings box. These are usually
options which don't make sense to change in the middle of a session
(for example, you can't switch from SSH to Telnet in mid-session).

\S2{using-copyall} Copy All to Clipboard

This system menu option provides a convenient way to copy the whole
contents of the terminal screen and scrollback to the clipboard in
one go.

\S2{reset-terminal} Clearing and resetting the terminal

The \q{Clear Scrollback} option on the system menu tells PuTTY to
discard all the lines of text that have been kept after they
scrolled off the top of the screen. This might be useful, for
example, if you displayed sensitive information and wanted to make
sure nobody could look over your shoulder and see it. (Note that
this only prevents a casual user from using the scrollbar to view
the information; the text is not guaranteed not to still be in
PuTTY's memory.)

The \q{Reset Terminal} option causes a full reset of the terminal
emulation. A VT-series terminal is a complex piece of software and
can easily get into a state where all the text printed becomes
unreadable. (This can happen, for example, if you accidentally
output a binary file to your terminal.) If this happens, selecting
Reset Terminal should sort it out.

\S2{using-fullscreen} Full screen mode

If you find the title bar on a maximised window to be ugly or
distracting, you can select Full Screen mode to maximise PuTTY
\q{even more}. When you select this, PuTTY will expand to fill the
whole screen and its borders, title bar and scrollbar will
disappear. (You can configure the scrollbar not to disappear in
full-screen mode if you want to keep it.)
\#{FIXME, document how and xref to it from here!}

When you are in full-screen mode, you can still access the system
menu if you click the left mouse button in the \e{extreme} top left
corner of the screen.

\H{using-logging} Creating a log file of your session

For some purposes you may find you want to log everything that
appears on your screen. You can do this using the \q{Logging} panel
in the configuration box.

To begin a session log, select \q{Change Settings} from the system
menu and go to the Logging panel. Enter a log file name, and select
a logging mode. (You can log all session output including the
terminal control sequences, or you can just log the printable text.
It depends what you want the log for.) Click \q{Apply} and your log
will be started. Later on, you can go back to the Logging panel and
select \q{Logging turned off completely} to stop logging; then PuTTY
will close the log file and you can safely read it.

See \k{config-logging} for more details and options.

\H{using-translation} Altering your character set configuration

If you find that special characters (accented characters, for
example) are not being displayed correctly in your PuTTY session, it
may be that PuTTY is interpreting the characters sent by the server
according to the wrong \e{character set}. There are a lot of
different character sets available, so it's entirely possible for
this to happen.

If you click \q{Change Settings} and look at the \q{Translation}
panel, you should see a large number of character sets which you can
select. Now all you need is to find out which of them you want!

\H{using-forwarding} Port forwarding and X forwarding in SSH

\# using X forwarding

\# using port forwarding

\H{using-rawprot} Making raw TCP connections

\# Raw protocol