[shoover]

I spent some time recently cleaning up my Putty sessions. My goal was to control all colors in the Putty settings and have everything look good with tmux, bash, and emacs out of the box. The result was basically what the OP arrived at. It works well as long as the Putty and tmux terminal types match (e.g. putty-256color and tmux-256color, respectively) with the exception of emacs isearch highlighting, which has bad contrasting defaults that also obscure the foreground text of the current match (why do we even bother with cyan and magenta?).

Here's a Ruby script that may be of use to paint over existing sessions using various color schemes gathered from around github and translated to Ruby data. https://gist.github.com/shoover/40a35c07a32de16af9b2f79ca933...