Setting up SecureCRT – Change Default Appearance + Auto-create Log File On Connect

Posted on by Admin

Related Post

  • No related post.
This is just a collection of convenient settings I’ve found elsewhere on the Internet. SecureCRT is a nice little piece of software to have in sitting on your laptop to connect to console/Telnet/SSH sessions you frequent/etc. Some of the settings I’d prefer to change from the default, mainly around appearance and with it not automatically creating a log file on connect.

Change Default Appearance
To change the default colour theme do the following:

  1. Go to Options > Global Options
  2. Under General > Default Session on left
  3. Click Edit Default Settings
  4. Navigate to Appearance in left pane
  5. Select the desired Color Theme in the drop down box

Turn on Auto-Create Log with Automatic Log File Name

To setup SecureCRT to log everything (trust me, it’s useful from time to time)… pretty much follow the first 3 steps above then:
  1. Navigate to Log File in left pane
  2. Under the Log File Name entry box, type in the path and name of the log file to use. For me I said the following: “C:\Console Logs\%Y-%M-%D.%h:%m – %H — %S.txt“
The % variables are all listed in the help file as follows:
  • %H – hostname
  • %S – session name
  • %Y – four-digit year
  • %M – two-digit month
  • %D – two-digit day of the month
  • %h – two-digit hour
  • %m – two-digit minute
  • %s – two-digit seconds
  • %t – three-digit milliseconds
  • %% – percent (%)
  • %envvar% – environment variable