I find applications that have column mode extremely useful (eg. UltraEdit).

It wasn’t until I was looking over someone’s shoulder whilst they were working that I realised Putty has a column mode (albeit read only), and it’s elegantly implemented.

Using Column Mode in Putty

It’s really quite simple. Barely worthy of the bullet points in fact:

• When you have Putty open, hold down the alt key and then using the mouse drag the area of the screen you wish to select.
• With its default settings, Putty will then copy what you’ve selected to the clipboard.

When could this be useful?

I’ve only recently discovered it, so excuse my list of 1, but I find it useful when selecting a list of file names from an ‘ls –l’ command:

Note: I tried to get a screenshot of it in action. Unfortunately it doesn’t capture the fact you’ve highlighted certain text. So please use your imagination and pretend the items in the blue box above have been highlighted/selected.

Helpfully, it trims the trailing spaces when you then go to insert the clipboard contents into another application.

Of course, there are other ways to achieve this (eg. ls –1 will return just the filenames).

Still, it’s a handy trick to know.