João Moreno .com

Console2, or simply Console, is an improvement to the Windows’ cmd.exe. On a more technical side, it’s merely a proxy to the cmd.exe process. It opens up the process, hides it, and redirects all the input and output to the app itself, so we have full control of a normal command prompt, but with additional features. But don’t let the hackish look of Console2 scare you, it’s done seamlessly and it’s really good.

Tabs are fun, tabs are easy and tabs are production-friendly. And Console2 handles tabs pretty well, and even allows you to create tab classes that open up with the CTRL+F# key combinations. It comes with a default tab class which uses cmd.exe (opens up with CTRL+F1). Let’s say you want to use the Python shell itself as I did. After proper configuration, Hitting CTRL+F2 opens a new tab containing the Python interactive interpreter (see screenshot above). You can even customize the cursor, background, window title of each tab class. Of course, you can open many tabs for each tab class.

It’s got the transparent background feature most *NIX terminals have. You can hide the menu bar, the tabs bar and the scroll bar. And all of this provides full customizing control on a already good looking interface.

Overall, it’s a great app considering the difficulties imposed by making an improved version of Microsoft’s own, closed source, Command.