I guess, almost everyone, resorts to Putty for connecting to production servers running linux from their windows desktop. I have long hated Putty's hot key interpretation. I miss my bash hotkeys Alt-B, Alt-F, Ctrl-K, etc. (even Home and End) in the Putty realm. Everything that I try gives the annoying '~'. Much recently, I stumbled upon:
http://superuser.com/questions/94436/how-to-configure-putty-so-that-home-end-pgup-pgdn-work-properly-in-bash
And my Putty frustration vanished instantly. In a nutshell, you just gotta set the terminal-type String under the Connection --> Data tab from “xterm” to “linux”.
