Iconography of the PuTTY tools

Speaking of which … I can’t remember why the screens were blue, either. I think I just intended it as a neutral-ish sort of colour which wasn’t black, so that it was clear that the screens were turned on.

That was a common look in Microsoft’s own icons at the time. Not in the “My Computer” icon (which reflected the default teal desktop background of Win95), but for instance three of the Control Panel icons (Display, Sounds, and System) use it, as well as the Shut Down icon in the Start menu, the Windows Installer icon, and several more I’m sure.

The Network Neighborhood icon had two machines arranged diagonally a lot like the PuTTY one, with one having a blue screen and the other one teal, for a bit of variety.

People sometimes object to the entire 1990s styling, and volunteer to design us a complete set of replacements in a different style. We’ve never liked any of them enough to adopt them. I think that’s probably because the 1990s styling is part of what makes PuTTY what it is – “reassuringly old-fashioned”.

That’s the kind of attitude that speak to my soul. I can open PuTTY in 2025 and there won’t be any degradation of functionality from the version I used 10 years ago, and the UI elements are where I’m used to find them. So many product today you open it one day and one important feature you used to rely on is either gone, moved, or has been “migrated” to a half baked replacement that don’t solve your problem anymore. No, PuTTY UI is not pretty nor intuitive, but its incredibly functional once you know what you are doing.

Never change PuTTY.

Pretty cool! I have fond memories of using PuTTY back in the early zeroes when I was still dual booting but already deep in the Linux/Unix world. Pageant especially was great as it allowed using Subversion (and CVS, I think?) securely without hassle.

Much later, in 2021, it became possible to write a version of pterm that would run on Windows, and act as an alternative GUI container for an ordinary Windows cmd.exe or Powershell session.

The WinPTY functions make this pretty easy! I’m sure that’s what pterm uses, given that release year. My terminal emulator also works like this on Windows if you want it to, and I suspect a great many unix ones are easy-ish to port over the same way.

But golly, on the icons themselves, I like the original ones better than each successive script, though they’re all pretty good right through to the svg. Microsoft’s guidelines still recommend you actually commission an artist to do at least three different sizes: 16x16 could use the hand touch of a pixel artist, then … I can’t find the reference right now but I think they suggest hand-drawing 48x48 and 128x128 as well, as auto scaling to the others isn’t too bad. But also beyond pixel art touches, you might need to redesign the icon too - something that conveys the same message in the smaller space might not be the same elements as the bigger one at all.