I’ve been working with TeamCity and NAnt build scripts a lot lately, and as a result I’ve found myself in and out of cmd.exe and one of my text editors of choice a lot lately.
So based on all this usage, I wanted to gear up my environment for maximum productivity, so the very first thing I did this morning was went and downloaded Console2, a great Command Prompt enhancer. I want to stress the point enhancer, and ensure you understand that it is not a shell replacement; far from it. Console2 is a fantastic tool I’ve used on and off over the years and usually find myself back in when I have to do a lot of work that requires a command prompt. I say it is not a shell replacement because it will not replace your cmd.exe in Windows, but merely serve as a ‘wrapper’ enabling you to use any shell of your choice, whether that be Windows cmd.exe, Cygwin, 4NT etc. and it then simply enhancing it with [and I quote directly from the website]:
Multiple tabs, text editor-like text selection, different background types, alpha and color-key transparency, configurable font, different window styles etc.
I personally love it because I can immediately turn off Courier New and turn on our beautiful faithful Clear Type Font friend, Consolas, in 10pt and turn the text colour to white because I find it’s easiest on the eyes, and worlds nicer than stock command prompt settings which can look quite washed out. Plus I can position or snap the Console window to any border or window I like and it will stay that way nicely after re-running it. Seems like I work for Console2? lol, well I don’t I just love the software!
So if that seems like something you’d be interested in, go check out, it’s open source and the developer provides full source code. I’ve been looking at the latest development build for the most recent changes to the program.
There is also a brilliant article on the forums I just followed which enabled me to associate batch files (.bat) directly through Console2, allowing it to display there rather than the regular cmd.exe by default. Plus if you didn’t do this, .bat files in Windows Vista are a real pain to work with if you need Administrative privileges as well as you can’t right click and change it to always execute with admin rights as it’s greyed out, therefore you have to right click and “Run As Administrator” each time on your batch file, but with this I can simply set the Console.exe with admin rights and viola, each batch file will ask me for admin privileges, which is great.
Finally for trick #2, there is an article describing how to configure additional shells within Console2 you may commonly use which can then be as easy to access as tab click, that being the Visual Studio 2005/2008 Command Prompt and Powershell!
What more could you ask for in a Console? (Except perhaps a replacement shell with colour coding.. But there is always Cygwin for that.)
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