Earlier today, I was setting up my PuTTY environment at my university. PuTTY’s user interface lends itself to a number of hurdles.
Although it has a decent amount of customizability, the UI makes each task overly complicated. For instance, PuTTY makes editing the color scheme absolutely tedious.
With a glimmer of hope, I searched Google for a more elegant solution to edit my PuTTY color scheme without having to deal with PuTTY itself.
A post on StackOverflow, at the bottom of the answers, indicated the solution I was longing for:

The title is self-explanatory, it’s an easy to use Terminal Color Scheme Designer.
Steps for PuTTY on Windows:
- Customize the Color scheme how you see fit
- Click on ‘Get Scheme’ in the upper right
- Export Scheme to a PuTTY configuration File
- Save file as .reg (Registry Extension)
- Optional: If you are not trying to change the color scheme for the PuTTY ‘Default Settings’ profile, you will have to edit:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY\Sessions\Default%20Settings]
- Execute the .reg file (and accept the Registry Editor warning*)
- Done!
As you may have noticed, this tool also works with many UNIX based terminals. I haven’t gotten to try it in Linux/UNIX environments, but please leave some feedback below if you run into any issues. I’ll see what I can do to help!
Big thanks to Maciej Ciemborowicz for creating this tool!
*Warning Note: I am not responsible for any broken Registries/Terminals that may be caused. Please read, understand and review files carefully before allowing them to edit your Registry.
Edit (2014/09/27):
For anyone wondering, the 4bit Terminal Color Scheme Designer supports the following terminal environments:
- xterm / aterm / rxvt / urxvt (.Xresources)
- gnome terminal (shell)
- guake (shell)
- konsole / yakuake (*.colorscheme)
- xfce4 terminal (terminalrc)
- iTerm2 (*.itermcolors)
- mintty (.minttyrc)
- putty (*.reg)
- terminator (config)