Is there a good commandline console for Windows? [closed]

Question

I usually develop with Ubuntu but now I'm forced to use Windows XP. It's actually pretty okay except the commandline is irritating. I miss resizing the window just with mouse but on windows I have to go inside the menus and change the width manually. Also copy pasting is hard from the console. You can only copy an area of the console, not individual lines.

Is there any good alternatives for the default commandline console in windows?

Answer 1

Console2 (www.sourceforge.net/projects/console). It is not a shell on its own, but gives a standard (resizable) window in which you can run other shells such as windows cmd.exe. It also supports pasting via the middle button as on linux.

Answer 2

For some reason nobody have mentioned Cygwin yet. It is quite a mature environment, fitting almost natively into Windows, with the good old rxvt available (no X11 required).

Answer 3

There is Powershell from Microsoft. It is Microsoft's best attempt at creating a shell script for Windows OS yet.

Edit: I guess I answered the wrong question, that is the command line tool... As Terje Mikal wrote, Console2 is nice and free. So, using a combination of Console2 and Powershell gives you a much more friendly environment than just cmd.exe

Answer 4

You're actually searching what on linux is called a terminal emulator. But yes, on Windows it's all mixed up in a single program. Anyway here it is one, a good one: Console 2

• Very configurable.
• Does transparent and semi transparent backgrounds too,
• you can rebind keys.
• It's quite resizable.

Get it from here.

Answer 5

Try ConEmu. I'm the author of this Windows console emulator.

Brief excerpt

• mixing elevated and non elevated tabs
• ability to use mouse for text and block selection, depending of pressed modifier (configurable, by default Alt - block, Shift - text)
• ability to copy on LButton up when selecting with mouse
• ability to position cursor in command prompt with mouse
• easily pasting text with keyboard (Shift+Ins by default)
• ability to start new tabs from existing
• Windows 7 jump list and progress bar
• simply macro support, for examle, you may map Ctrl+D to pasting "exit\n", or change console font size with Ctrl+MouseWheel
• some options may be configured separately by applications (palettes for example)

Rapidly developed, one of the latest features - command shell inside windows explorer pane.

This is a console for developers, by developers. It seems like every time I think "well, it would be nice if it did _", there's an option for it. Major thanks for fixing such a broken console experience in Windows! - drharris

Answer 6

MSYS (http://mingw.org/) is pretty close to a unix shell and has most of the unix utilities. Or try busybox for win32 (busybox) - a single tiny executable that will provide functionality of utilities like -

[, [[, ar, ash, awk, base64, basename, bash, bbconfig, bunzip2, bzcat,
bzip2, cal, cat, catv, cksum, cmp, comm, cp, cpio, cut, date, dc, dd,
diff, dirname, dos2unix, echo, ed, egrep, env, expand, expr, false,
fgrep, find, fold, getopt, grep, gunzip, gzip, hd, head, hexdump, kill,
killall, length, ls, lzcat, lzma, lzop, lzopcat, md5sum, mkdir, mv, od,
pgrep, pidof, printenv, printf, ps, pwd, rm, rmdir, rpm2cpio, sed, seq,
sh, sha1sum, sha256sum, sha512sum, sleep, sort, split, strings, sum,
tac, tail, tar, tee, test, touch, tr, true, uncompress, unexpand, uniq,
unix2dos, unlzma, unlzop, unxz, unzip, usleep, uudecode, uuencode, vi,
wc, wget, which, whoami, xargs, xz, xzcat, yes, zcat