A fellow programmer and I found this useful add-on for PuTTY to add tabs and help manage lots of open PuTTY terminals.
PuTTY Connection Manager

I found a useful site that has Windows versions of the nice console fonts I’m used to in Linux.  I usually set the 6×13 font as my default font in PuTTY.  As the author says the .fon format may not work in all Windows programs but it does seem to work nicely in PuTTY.

Linux console fonts for Windows

The _vimrc file for Windows gVim allows me to set customizations that load when gVim starts.  This saves me from having to manually set the font and colors amongst other things every time I edit a file.  Since gVim for Windows adds a nice right click menu option for opening files with Vim, I often use it as an alternative to notepad.

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Vim enhancements I use in my .vimrc to help with Perl coding:

" visual bell, no annoying beeps
set vb

" incremental search,
" highlights as you type so you know where you'll jump to
set incsearch
" ignore case when searching
set ignorecase
" but don't ignore if user types a capital letter
set smartcase

" dont use Q for Ex mode,
" this gets typed a lot by accident when you meant shift-q not caps-q
map Q :q

"Wrap at this column (perl best practices)
set textwidth=78

" auto indent
autocmd FileType perl set autoindent|set smartindent
" with 4 space tabs (compatible with perltidy)
autocmd FileType perl set tabstop=4|set shiftwidth=4|set expandtab|set softtabstop=4

" show matching brackets
autocmd FileType perl set showmatch

" check your code by typing :make
" cursor will jump to an offending line if any
autocmd FileType perl set makeprg=perl\ -c\ %\ $*
autocmd FileType perl set errorformat=%f:%l:%m
autocmd FileType perl set autowrite

" turning paste on in insert mode will allow you to paste code cleanly
set pastetoggle=<F11>

" this will help with Perl that has POD documentation
let perl_include_pod = 1

" this lets perl color complex variables
let perl_extended_vars = 1

" Tidy selected lines (or entire file) with _t:
nnoremap <silent> _t :%!perltidy -q --perl-best-practices -l=115<Enter>
vnoremap <silent> _t :!perltidy -q --perl-best-practices -l=115<Enter>

Some of the info above was gathered from the .vimrc for perl programmers post at perlmonks.org.

Related to my previous post on the Desert Color Scheme for XTerm I also want to put up how to get the desert color scheme into PuTTY for Windows.

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