Spice Up Your Linux Demos With PuTTY’s “Presenter Mode”

calendar Mar 7, 2018 · Linux Presentations Tools  ·
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If you've done any amount of work in Linux from Windows, chances are pretty good you've used PuTTY at some point. PuTTY is a free and open-source terminal emulator that supports a variety of protocols, including SSH. I've been using it since college and have always been very happy with it. It's free, it's tiny, and it just works.

With the advent of SQL Server 2017 on Linux I find myself using it rather frequently once again, but this time around I'm not just using PuTTY for myself. Now I'm trying to take screenshots of it for slide decks, and doing demos in presentations. In a world of flashy graphics and high-resolution screenshots, PuTTY's simplicity can become a problem. Remember, it's a terminal emulator. Its job is to display text. By default it's 80 columns wide* and 24 rows high.

A PuTTY window doesn't take up a whole lot of screen real estate at this size, especially for modern HD monitors.This is great for everyday use, and terrible for teaching others. Screenshots end up tiny, and if you scale the image they tend to look horrible and pixelated.

A default size PuTTY window.

It might look great on your screen right now, but being projected on a wall this becomes a problem.

Fortunately PuTTY has an option to fix this, which has evaded me for the better part of the 18 years I've been using it. It's not quite as flashy as "Presenter Mode" that SQL Server Management Studio released a few years back, but it is incredibly helpful. On the configuration screen, click the "Window" category and select the radio option to "Change the size of the font." That's all there is to it.

Select the "Window" category

Set the font size to change when the window is resized

Now connect to your server of choice and resize the window as you see fit. Instead of the window getting larger and the text staying small, the text will now grow with the window. Screenshots can be much clearer, and on-screen demos are delightful!

(click to view full size)

*Why do terminal windows tend to be 80 columns wide by default, anyway? Probably because the IBM punched card format, introduced in 1928, used cards that had 80 columns. When it came time to ditch the cards and edit them on a screen instead, 80 columns seemed like a good enough size to stick with.