Channel Mike

I've been using putty for years. It's an absolutely fantastic tool for monitoring headless servers and cross-platform development. I don't think I've ever had a character set that was completely perfect, though. My most recent small frustration has been that rather than quotation marks, I get little 'a' characters with a carat over them. How you google for a specific character, which obviously differs depending on character set is completely beyond me. But I eventually found a solution and I'd like to share.

I have messed with a few different character sets in Putty's configuration dialog, but never found anything better. Perhaps some people know what the common character sets might be. I don't.

In putty, running a session on an assumed linux box, the LANG environment variable contains information about your encoding.
user@server:~$ echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8

I then switched my putty preferences from some Latin character set that was close enough, but not perfect, to the perfect UTF-8. I've gone from this:

to this:

I can't believe it was this simple and I've just been living with it for years. Done, now! :-)