l o o s e l y typed

PuTTY's ("Putty" henceforth) default color scheme doesn't work for everyone. Especially, the (pure) blue color used for listing folders; that looks terrible on the black background.

On searching for better color schemes for Putty, I stumbled upon this blog post which shows two color schemes for Putty. Out of these, I settled for the Zenburn color scheme.

Steps to modify Putty's color scheme and saving it to new or already loaded sessions can be found here.

Putty RGB colors/options for the Zenburn color scheme are as follows -

Default Foreground - 255/255/255
Default Background - 51/51/51
ANSI Black - 77/77/77
ANSI Green - 152/251/152
ANSI Yellow - 240/230/140
ANSI Blue - 205/133/63
ANSI Blue Bold -135/206/235
ANSI Magenta - 255/222/173 or 205/92/92
ANSI Cyan - 255/160/160
ANSI Cyan Bold - 255/215/0
ANSI White - 245/222/179

In addition to the above colors, I applied two more changes to the font (Putty -> Window -> Appearance -> Font Settings) -

Font - Consolas, 10-point
Font quality - Default (you can play around with this option to see what suits your screen/display best).

Zenburn theme in a PuTTY console.

Edit: If you're on Windows, check out this Github repo which contains ready made registry files for installing the Zenburn scheme in Putty.

Zenburn - A pleasant color scheme for PuTTY