I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people ask me how they can export their Putty settings. For those of you who have been completely in the dark for the last decade, Putty is a Telnet and SSH client for Windows and Unix. Below I outline the steps to accomplish this goal; these steps should work for all versions of Windows. Putty stores the client settings in the Windows registry. The below steps are something of a hack to export and then import your Putty settings to a different PC since Putty doesn’t have the built in functionality to do this. A word of advice – you should be very careful when working with the Windows registry as you can cause severe problems if you make any incorrect modifications.
1. From the command prompt, type “regedit” and hit “Enter”
2. Once the “regedit” GUI pops up, hit “Ctrl-F” and type in “Simon Tatham”. Simon is the original developer of Putty. Make sure only the “Keys” checkbox is selected and click “Find Next”.Searching for the Putty settings in the Windows registry
3. Eventually a folder named “SimonTatham” will be found and highlighted on the left pane of the “regedit” GUI. Simply right click it and select “Export”. Save the file with whatever name you like such as “putty.reg”.
4. To import the setting onto a computer that already has Putty installed, simply right click the file and select “Merge”. Your Putty settings have now been transferred to another PC.
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Instead of mucking around in regedit, I have these command lines saved in the .txt file where I keep such things handy to copy into a cmd prompt:
reg export HKCU\Software\SimonTatham H:\RDP\PuTTY.reg
reg import H:\RDP\PuTTY.reg
(I happen to have a directory “RDP” to hold config files for Remote Desktop sessions set up on my networked “home” drive accessible from all computers I use at work, so stuffing my PuTTY config in there too made sense. You will probably choose a different location for your PuTTY.reg file.)
If you want to be sure you always save changes, then create a PuTTY.bat file and use it (or a shortcut to it) to run PuTTY every time like this:
@echo off
reg import H:\RDP\PuTTY.reg
“C:\Program Files (x86)\putty.exe”
reg export HKCU\Software\SimonTatham H:\RDP\PuTTY.reg
Thanks for sharing Monty; yes, creating batch files for these types of tasks is very effective in preventing errors and saving time.
In just want to say thank you, your instructions were very simple and efficient.
Thank you for posting this. Very helpful. Please note that the “Merge” step above only appears to work if you save the .reg file to the local PC. Don’t save it to a networked drive. The Merge will not be successful.
Perfect.
Simple and perfect.
Thanks for posting this. One point which becomes obvious when you get no hits with “Simon Tatham”, is that the search for Simon has no space, but was not clear with the word wrap in the instructions.
Thanks for your posting. It did help and saved our time.