Get a better font for PuTTY

PuTTY is a popular SSH client for Windows — it works great and it’s free.  Out of the box it uses the Courier font, which looks like this:

I prefer the appearance of a traditional Linux (X11) console font.  To me, it makes text much easier to read.  A few years ago I came across a nice-looking Windows version of that font that works great with PuTTY.   Observe the difference:

If you like this better, simply download the MiscFixedSC613 font from April King and drop it into c:\windows\fonts.  When you configure PuTTY, remember that this is a 9-point font only.

While we are on the topic of PuTTY, here is another tip.  Although PuTTY has a sophisticated configuration dialog that allows storing of profiles for hosts, I’ve found that it is generally easier if I skip all that and launch it the same way I use ssh from a Linux machine.  To do this, make sure putty.exe is in your PATH, open the Run dialog and type in putty user@host, like so:

No muss, no fuss, no empty cans.

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