Every time I launched PuTTY, I had to either manually set the colours and the lines of scroll back, or create a profile just to save the settings I desired.

Puttys scrollback lines default value

PuTTY stores its settings in the registry. Here’s a short tutorial on how you can modify PuTTYs registry settings to change its default startup values.

Change PuTTYs Default Startup Values

Let’s, for this tutorial, increase the default “Lines of scrollback” (default value is 200)

Note: Before modifying the registry, ALWAYS make a backup.
  1. Go to Run (Win+R), type regedit and press enter.
  2. In the registry editor, press Ctrl+F  to bring up the search box and search for SimonTatham Search for SimonTatham
  3. Expand the result SimonTatham > PuTTY > Sessions
  4. Click on Default%20Settings. Scroll down on the right pane until you find the value ScrollbackLines

    Find ScrollbackLines
  5. Double click on ScrollbackLines and change its value to 20000. Make sure you click the decimal radio button before modifying the value.

    Change the value

  6. Press OK and you are done. Launch PuTTY and observe the default settings.

    PuTTY default values have changed. 

I use this trick to change the default number of “lines of scrollback”, and the “use system colours” settings, but there’s a whole lot of settings you can change. Eliminates the need to change those parameters for every connection manually every time.  :)

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You may also like to read:
  1. Scroll beyond the default limit in Putty Session
  2. How to make Putty remember colour settings
  3. Set a profile as default in Firefox [How to]
  4. Backup Bitmeter settings for future installs
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