How can I set PuTTY's window title to the name of the loaded session?

To change the PuTTY SSH session window title (one by one manually by the PuTTY GUI):

For Windows & Debian

1. Load a session from PuTTY.
2. On left side tree menu, click on: Window → Behaviour.
3. On the right panel, in the Window title text box enter your title.
4. Save the session.

To change the PuTTY SSH session window title (for all sessions by command line):

For Debian 8 (Jessie)

1. Go to the folder where PuTTY stores sessions: /home/nolwennig/.putty/sessions

   Note: replace nolwennig with your username

2. Assign to parameter WinTitle the saved session file name for each saved session file with something like this:

   find . -type f -exec sed -e 's/^WinTitle=/WinTitle=%f/g' {} \;

   It works fine if no WinTitle is recorded

For Windows

1. PuTTY stores sessions in Windows registry HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Simontatham\PuTTY\Sessions

   Note: not replace SimonTatham with your username.

2. You can export this section with a command like this:

   C:> regedit /e "%userprofile%\desktop\putty-registry-sessions.reg" HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Simontatham\PuTTY\Sessions
   

3. It must be possible to make a script that updates the putty-registry-sessions.reg file to change the value of WinTitle for each of the saved sessions.

Sources & inspirations:

• kurumi for https://stackoverflow.com/a/5456142/4457531
• brandizzi for https://stackoverflow.com/a/6739322/4457531
• FGreg for https://stackoverflow.com/a/13012743/4457531
• m0nhawk for https://stackoverflow.com/a/13023979/4457531

The solution below seems to solve this problem.

1) Go to the aforementioned Window/Behaviour/Window Title setting and put in a title that makes sense to you.

2) Go to the Terminal/Features settings and check off the Disable remote-controlled window title changing box.

This function will set the title of your PuTTY window to the given string:

# Set title
title() {
  echo -ne "\033]0;"$1"\007"
}

You can use this to set the title from the command line or from scripts, e.g. from within .bashrc.

I was looking for how to make window titles stick when using PuTTY with session files.

So in .putty/sessions/ServerX, set a default title and no remote behaviour as:

NoRemoteWinTitle=1
WinTitle=Welcome to ServerX

And to give it a special title for some particular purpose, just override the default:

putty -load .putty/sessions/ServerX -title "ServerX:/var/log/messages"