Cmder! Wow.

Discovered chalk. Via which I discovered Cmder, a (portable) console emulator for Windows based on ConEmu. Which is itself a console emulator for Windows.

I was aware of Console2 which I have previously used (discovered that via Scott Hanselman) but Cmder seems to be in active development, is prettier, and has a lot more features.

cmder

Notice I have multiple tabs open; they can run PowerShell, cmd.exe, Bash, Putty(!), scripts you specify; tabs running in an admin context have a shield next to them; I can select themes for each tab (the default is Monokai which is quite pretty); I have a status bar which can show various bits and pieces of info; and it’s all in one window whose tabs I can keep switching through (I can create hotkeys to start tabs with a particular task and even set a bunch of tabs to start as one task and then select that task as the default).

cmder-tasks

I couldn’t find much help on how to use Cmder until I realized I can use the documentation of ConEmu as it’s based on the latter. For instance, this page has details on the -new_console switches I use above. This page has details on the various command-line switches that ConEmu and Cmder accept. Scott Hanselman has a write-up on ConEmu which is worth reading as he goes into much more of the features.

Here’s my task definitions in case it helps anyone:

 

Notice a single task can start multiple commands (tasks), each with its own settings.