crazylazy.info

txtIf you're like me, somehow oldschool, and you're not just using Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7, where PowerShell is the new standard, you may like this tiny little tool: PowerCMD.



It has got Tabs, tiling window management, colors, it's resizable, popup auto-completion... Here's a complete list. It even minimizes to tray, next to the SSH client I use. Which makes kind of sense I think. ;)

As an alternative, cooler, and free option I want to link Console. It's a wonderful free application:

Console is a Win console window enhancement. It was inspired by eConsole
(http://www.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/~corion), a great console-enhancement
program (unfortunately, it seems that it's no longer being developed)

Console features include configurable font, color, size, background image and
transparency (on Win2000 and later)

Console is *not* a shell. It's simply a nice-looking front end for a shell
of your choice (cmd.exe, 4NT, ksh, Cygwin bash, etc.)

The transparent background shows a necessary DLL file. Furthermore you should configure it to start powershell.exe from windows/system32/windowspowershelll.
This tool hasn't got popup-auto completion (but tab completion of course) but it supports cmd.exe and powershell.exe and cygwin's shells like zsh or bash. It's a very handy utility. For all shells!

And before you ask: yes I tried to start powershell.exe in rxvt and Terminator. Powershell doesn't work in rxvt. rxvt is a non-X11 terminal from the cygwin project:

This starts the cmd.exe in a readable kind of way from the shortcut.


C:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -geometry 80x40 -bg black -fg gray -fn "Lucida Console-11" -sr -sl 5000 -j -tn rxvt -e cmd -li


This is for zsh.


C:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -geometry 80x40 -bg black -fg gray -fn "Lucida Console-11" -sr -sl 5000 -j -tn rxvt -e C:\cygwin\bin\zsh -li





Looks like this for zsh. The bottom bar is from GNU screen, which you can install from the cygwin project. My .screenrc is:


hardstatus string '%{= kG}[ %{G}%H %{g}][%= %{= kw}%?%-Lw%?%{r}(%{W}%n*%f%t%?(%u)%?%{r})%{w}%?%+Lw%?%?%= %{g}][%{B} %d/%m %{W}%c %{g}]'


I took this from a geeky gentoo wiki site I think. Some month ago. Powershell, of course, doesn't work in screen. And cmd.exe, either doesn't. A dirty hack is to export cygwin's bin directory into the Windows environment variables into the path. I don't recommend this for your development environment.

Have fun,
wishi