632f6445390b22125ee00063916403f0a5f8b67d
[sgt/putty] / doc / using.but
1 \versionid $Id: using.but,v 1.2 2001/11/25 19:22:47 simon Exp $
2
3 \C{using} Using PuTTY
4
5 This chapter provides a general introduction to some more advanced
6 features of PuTTY. For extreme detail and reference purposes,
7 \k{config} is likely to contain more information.
8
9 \H{using-session} During your session
10
11 A lot of PuTTY's complexity and features are in the configuration
12 panel. Once you have worked your way through that and started
13 a session, things should be reasonably simple after that.
14 Nevertheless, there are a few more useful features available.
15
16 \S{using-selection} Copying and pasting text
17
18 Often in a PuTTY session you will find text on your terminal screen
19 which you want to type in again. Like most other terminal emulators,
20 PuTTY allows you to copy and paste the text rather than having to
21 type it again. Also, copy and paste uses the Windows clipboard, so
22 that you can paste (for example) URLs into a web browser, or paste
23 from a word processor or spreadsheet into your terminal session.
24
25 PuTTY's copy and paste works entirely with the mouse. In order to
26 copy text to the clipboard, you just click the left mouse button in
27 the terminal window, and drag to select text. When you let go of the
28 button, the text is \e{automatically} copied to the clipboard. You
29 do not need to press Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Ins; in fact, if you do press
30 Ctrl-C, PuTTY will send a Ctrl-C character down your session to the
31 server where it will probably cause a process to be interrupted.
32
33 Pasting is done using the right button (or the middle mouse button,
34 if you have a three-button mouse and have set it up; see
35 \k{config-mouse}). When you click the right mouse button, PuTTY will
36 read whatever is in the Windows Clipboard and paste it into your
37 session, \e{exactly} as if it had been typed at the keyboard.
38 (Therefore, be careful of pasting formatted text into an editor that
39 does automatic indenting; you may find that the spaces pasted from
40 the clipboard plus the spaces added by the editor add up to too many
41 spaces and ruin the formatting. There is nothing PuTTY can do about
42 this.)
43
44 If you double-click the left mouse button, PuTTY will select a whole
45 word. If you double-click, hold down the second click, and drag the
46 mouse, PuTTY will select a sequence of whole words. (You can adjust
47 precisely what PuTTY considers to be part of a word; see
48 \k{config-charclasses}.) If you \e{triple}-click, or triple-click
49 and drag, then PuTTY will select a whole line or sequence of lines.
50
51 If you want to select a rectangular region instead of selecting to
52 the end of each line, you can do this by holding down Alt when you
53 make your selection. (You can also configure rectangular selection
54 to be the default, and then holding down Alt gives the normal
55 behaviour instead. See \k{config-rectselect} for details.)
56
57 If you have a middle mouse button, then you can use it to adjust an
58 existing selection if you selected something slightly wrong. (If you
59 have configured the middle mouse button to paste, then the right
60 mouse button does this instead.) Click the button on the screen, and
61 you can pick up the nearest end of the selection and drag it to
62 somewhere else.
63
64 \S{using-scrollback} Scrolling the screen back
65
66 PuTTY keeps track of text that has scrolled up off the top of the
67 terminal. So if something appears on the screen that you want to
68 read, but it scrolls too fast and it's gone by the time you try to
69 look for it, you can use the scrollbar on the right side of the
70 window to look back up the session history and find it again.
71
72 As well as using the scrollbar, you can also page the scrollback up
73 and down by pressing Shift-PgUp and Shift-PgDn. These are still
74 available if you configure the scrollbar to be invisible.
75
76 By default the last 200 lines scrolled off the top are
77 preserved for you to look at. You can increase (or decrease) this
78 value using the configuration box; see \k{config-scrollback}.
79
80 \S{using-sysmenu} The System menu
81
82 If you click the left mouse button on the icon in the top left
83 corner of PuTTY's window, or click the right mouse button on the
84 title bar, you will see the standard Windows system menu containing
85 items like Minimise, Move, Size and Close.
86
87 PuTTY's system menu contains extra program features in addition to
88 the Windows standard options. These extra menu commands are
89 described below.
90
91 \S2{using-eventlog} The PuTTY Event Log
92
93 If you choose \q{Event Log} from the system menu, a small window
94 will pop up in which PuTTY logs significant events during the
95 connection. Most of the events in the log will probably take place
96 during session startup, but a few can occur at any point in the
97 session, and one or two occur right at the end.
98
99 You can use the mouse to select one or more lines of the Event Log,
100 and hit the Copy button to copy them to the clipboard. If you are
101 reporting a bug, it's often useful to paste the contents of the
102 Event Log into your bug report.
103
104 \S2{using-newsession} Starting new sessions
105
106 PuTTY's system menu provides some shortcut ways to start new
107 sessions:
108
109 \b Selecting \q{New Session} will start a completely new instance of
110 PuTTY, and bring up the configuration box as normal.
111
112 \b Selecting \q{Duplicate Session} will start a session with
113 precisely the same options as your current one - connecting to the
114 same host using the same protocol, with all the same terminal
115 settings and everything.
116
117 \b The \q{Saved Sessions} submenu gives you quick access to any
118 sets of stored session details you have previously saved. See
119 \k{config-saving} for details of how to create saved sessions.
120
121 \S2{using-changesettings} Changing your session settings
122
123 If you select \q{Change Settings} from the system menu, PuTTY will
124 display a cut-down version of its initial configuration box. This
125 allows you to adjust most properties of your current session. You
126 can change the terminal size, the font, the actions of various
127 keypresses, the colours, and so on.
128
129 Some of the options that are available in the main configuration box
130 are not shown in the cut-down Change Settings box. These are usually
131 options which don't make sense to change in the middle of a session
132 (for example, you can't switch from SSH to Telnet in mid-session).
133
134 \S2{using-copyall} Copy All to Clipboard
135
136 This system menu option provides a convenient way to copy the whole
137 contents of the terminal screen and scrollback to the clipboard in
138 one go.
139
140 \S2{reset-terminal} Clearing and resetting the terminal
141
142 The \q{Clear Scrollback} option on the system menu tells PuTTY to
143 discard all the lines of text that have been kept after they
144 scrolled off the top of the screen. This might be useful, for
145 example, if you displayed sensitive information and wanted to make
146 sure nobody could look over your shoulder and see it. (Note that
147 this only prevents a casual user from using the scrollbar to view
148 the information; the text is not guaranteed not to still be in
149 PuTTY's memory.)
150
151 The \q{Reset Terminal} option causes a full reset of the terminal
152 emulation. A VT-series terminal is a complex piece of software and
153 can easily get into a state where all the text printed becomes
154 unreadable. (This can happen, for example, if you accidentally
155 output a binary file to your terminal.) If this happens, selecting
156 Reset Terminal should sort it out.
157
158 \S2{using-fullscreen} Full screen mode
159
160 If you find the title bar on a maximised window to be ugly or
161 distracting, you can select Full Screen mode to maximise PuTTY
162 \q{even more}. When you select this, PuTTY will expand to fill the
163 whole screen and its borders, title bar and scrollbar will
164 disappear. (You can configure the scrollbar not to disappear in
165 full-screen mode if you want to keep it; see \k{config-scrollback}.)
166
167 When you are in full-screen mode, you can still access the system
168 menu if you click the left mouse button in the \e{extreme} top left
169 corner of the screen.
170
171 \H{using-logging} Creating a log file of your session
172
173 For some purposes you may find you want to log everything that
174 appears on your screen. You can do this using the \q{Logging} panel
175 in the configuration box.
176
177 To begin a session log, select \q{Change Settings} from the system
178 menu and go to the Logging panel. Enter a log file name, and select
179 a logging mode. (You can log all session output including the
180 terminal control sequences, or you can just log the printable text.
181 It depends what you want the log for.) Click \q{Apply} and your log
182 will be started. Later on, you can go back to the Logging panel and
183 select \q{Logging turned off completely} to stop logging; then PuTTY
184 will close the log file and you can safely read it.
185
186 See \k{config-logging} for more details and options.
187
188 \H{using-translation} Altering your character set configuration
189
190 If you find that special characters (accented characters, for
191 example) are not being displayed correctly in your PuTTY session, it
192 may be that PuTTY is interpreting the characters sent by the server
193 according to the wrong \e{character set}. There are a lot of
194 different character sets available, so it's entirely possible for
195 this to happen.
196
197 If you click \q{Change Settings} and look at the \q{Translation}
198 panel, you should see a large number of character sets which you can
199 select. Now all you need is to find out which of them you want!
200
201 \H{using-forwarding} Port forwarding and X forwarding in SSH
202
203 \# using X forwarding
204
205 \# using port forwarding
206
207 \H{using-rawprot} Making raw TCP connections
208
209 \# Raw protocol