Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Tabbed command prompt in Windows

No matter which OS you use (that even goes to my short experience with OS X), if you're a developer/admin/professional you're gonna spent a lot of time with a command prompt. This means there might be quite a lot command prompt windows opened. This is the case with me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Having said that, I'm quite used to gnome-termianl's and konsole's multi-tabbed command prompt interface, which is just as revolutionary as tabbed web-browser interface. Once used it, you'll never be able to go back.

For the past few months, most of my work is done on a Windows workstation, which I use to develop in multiple programming languages, research web-oriented security stuff and manage several Linux servers. Last week, while doing all of those at the same time, I got tired of the mess, and looked for a better way to manage my command prompts. Here is the result. Apparently this is not very new, so I was surprised I haven't heard about it before. Console 2.0 is a real bless, and is exactly what I was looking for, no more, no less.
Now, I have shortcuts for opening new tabs of several kinds:
  • Standard CMD.
  • Cygwin bash shell.
  • Visual Studio 2005 command prompt.
  • PowerShell (thought giving it a shot. For now I still think it sucks)
  • Pre-configued command line SSH connections (ssh -l username host) for several servers. This is way more handy than the other Putty wrappers.
Now the taskbar is less cluttered, and I have quick shortcuts to every type of command prompt I need. It really does improve productivity.

1 comment:

  1. Just today a mate recommended me about Console 2.0. Haven't tried yet.

    I think that PowerShell has some good points. As you said, too bad it's so much different (and longer) than popular Unix commands. But it's so much better than cmd.exe.

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