Console2 - the better command prompt

by Gregor Uhlenheuer on October 9, 2011

For all of you that don’t know Console2: it’s a Windows console replacement that among others includes support for multiple tabs, text-editor like selection, transparency and configurable fonts.

Now that I just happened to visit Scott Hanselman’s blog in order to read about a good initial startup configuration I decided to write a short post about Console2 too.

Installation

1. Just go to the project’s site on sourceforge and download the latest version available: http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/files/
2. Extract the contents of the downloaded archive into a directory of your liking. I would recommend a folder that is in your PATH (in my case d:\bin\).
3. You are now ready to go by launching the Console2.exe executable

Configuration

The following configuration example is heavily inspired by Scott Hanselman’s great blog post about Console2 and slightly modified to my own preference. The following points are a few recommendations on how to configure Console2:

• Start Console2
• Open the settings on Edit → Settings
• Configure your Startup directory under Console
• Hide the menu, status bar and tool bar under Appearance → More
• Set your font to Consolas under Appearance
• Set Copy on Select under Behavior
• Switch to the Hotkeys menu:
  • Set New Tab1 to Ctrl-T
  • Set Copy Selection to Ctrl-C
  • Set Paste to Ctrl-V
• Configure some default tabs:
  • VS 2010 prompt: %comspec% /k "D:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\vsvarsall.bat"
  • Powershell: %SystemRoot%\syswow64\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe
  • git: D:\msysgit\bin\sh.exe --login -i

If you intend to use Console2 with git, I would recommend to not modify your default font color unlike Scott Hanselman suggests. With a modified font color you will loose the shell coloring git provides i.e. on using commands like git diff.

This post is tagged with windows, tools and console