Sunday, May 24, 2009

Windows Command Prompt (CMD) Replacement

I am sick and tired of the boring windows command prompt (cmd.exe). It hasn't changed since windows 95 (or longer). Its such an archaic piece of software that Microsoft just hasn't bother updating. My search for a suitable replacement for the windows terminal ended after discovering Console.

Console is an open source piece of software that is far superior to the Windows terminal. One of the key improvements in Console is that is allows Tabs. I hate having to open up a number of command prompt windows when I have to execute different commands from different locations. Console is fully customizable. While providing functionality to change standard things like the font, background color, mouse behavior, it also has cool features like transparency.

I love to make use of both Windows and Linux functionality. I have cygwin installed on my machine, that brings most of the commands found in the Linux world like grep, find, make etc to the Windows world. However, cygwin doesn't have a decent terminal window. Console can be configured to execute cygwin. Its easy as going to Edit->Setting->Console and setting the shell to \bin\bash.exe and setting the startup directory to the cygwin home directory.

4 comments:

jerick john mercado said...

i am new here and i am glad to be member of this!!!!

gogleyedboggle said...

hmm, could you be more specific on how to get it to work with cygwin?
I have set the sell to bin/bash.exe
but setting the home dir, do you mean the dir called home? or cygwin dir? I ask because it works a little but some of the commands that work in cywin dont work in console
like:
ls
touch

(p'.')p said...

Thanks for the tip, this is exactly what I was after!!!

@gogleyedboggle:
Shell: C:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe --login -i
Startup Dir: C:\cygwin

Brainasoft Team said...

Console 2 is cool as a freeware app but it is not so stable for professional use. There is a similar software like console named FireCMD command shell. It is a better cmd replacement with more features but it is not free.