OK, I admit it - I’m a dinosaur. I still use the command line a lot as I’m subscribing to the belief that I can often type faster than I can move my hand off the keyboard to the mouse, click, and move my hand back. Plus, I grew up in an era when the command line was what you got when you turned on the computer, and Windows 2.0 or GEM was a big improvement.

One of the neat features of the console emulators on both on Linux and Mac OS X was and is that you could run a set of shells in a tabbed single console window. A post on Scott Hanselman’s blog put me onto Console2. That was more like it and I pretty much immediately housed my Windows shells - either cmd.exe or PowerShell - in there. Much better, but over time the pace of development slowed and the last beta release dates from 2011. It’s not like the Beta is buggy or anything - in fact, in my experience it works very nicely indeed - but of course as a software engineer I like shiny new things.

Enter, via another post on Scott Hanselman’s blog, ConEmu - or ConEmu-Maximus5, to give it its full name. If Console2 is the VW Golf to the stock Windows’ console emulator’s 1200cc VW Bug, then ConEmu is the VW Phaeton to Console2’s VW Golf. It’s got a lot more features, it’s actively developed, it works well with Far Manager if you miss the Norton Commander days and it’s highly configurable. Of course, it can also handle transparent backgrounds, but so can Console2.

For me, it has one killer feature - recent versions detect which shells you have installed on your machine and offer you a selection via the green “new tab” button (the one that looks a bit like a French Pharmacy sign), with a choice of running them either as a regular user or admin user:

Why is this such a big deal? Well, it’s neat if you’re using both PowerShell and cmd.exe, but for me it’s a killer feature because I like using TCC/LE at home. TCC/LE is the familiar Windows command prompt at first glance but in the same way that ConEmu is a much expanded console emulator compared to the regular Windows one, TCC/LE is a much expanded command prompt that is a lot more feature rich and has a lot of sensible extensions. And because I’m such a dinosaur, I’ve actually been using its predecessors (4DOS and 4NT) way back when they were distributed as shareware on a floppy disk and you had to buy the manuals for them to get the registration code. And yes, I still have at least the 4DOS manual.

Back to console emulators, though. If I wanted to go nitpicking, both ConEmu and Console2 work less well over an RDP connection than the stock console, which is noticeable if you tend to remote into machines quite frequently. It’s not that they work badly, but Microsoft clearly spent a lot of time optimising the stock console to work well over RDP (or to have RDP work well with the stock console), so there is a bit of lag when scrolling. It doesn’t make either tool unusable but you notice it’s there.

Anyway, if you check out one new tool this week, make it ConEmu.