A lot of times, the built-in Command Prompt may suit your occasional needs to run command lines. But if you are a windows console fan and want much more than what Windows Command Prompt has to offer, it’s time to look around for the better alternatives.
If that’s the case, here are 4 better alternatives that have fantastic improvements over to Windows terminal experience.
Console
Console is a free Windows console enhancement tool that has some of the features that the Command Prompt lacks, such as multiple tabs, text editor-like text selection, different background types, alpha and color key transparency, configurable font, different window styles, etc.. You can also increase the buffer size to cache much more lines of commands and results than you need, which is a much nicer feature to have.
You can also check out our detailed review of Console here.
PowerCmd
PowerCmd streamlines the Command Prompt with an easy-to-use GUI interface with nice features including:
- Tab-based console
- Enhanced text editing capabilities
- Bookmarks to easily move between them
- Filtered command prompt history
- Automatically save the output of the console
- Search to find anything in the console
- Visible AutoCompletion.
- Display command prompt environment variables
You can also check out our review of PowerCmd here.
ColorConsole
ColorConsole not only brings color to the dull black white world of windows console but also adds a few more useful features like:
- Store your favorite command
- Export the output in HTML and RTF format
- Make Copy, Paste super easy
- Tab-based console
- Much faster folder switches right from the toolbar.
- etc.
You can also check out our review of ColorConsole here.
ConEmu
ConEmu is a Windows console emulator with tabs, which presents multiple consoles and simple GUI applications as one customizable GUI window with various features.
- Windows 7 Jump List and Progress on the taskbar.
- Easily run old Dos Applications in Windows 7.
- Thumbnails and tiles in Far Manager
- using normal/bold/italic fonts for different parts of the console simultaneously
- Highly customizable with a lot of settings to customize.
- Very easy to launch as administrator.
- etc.
Other alternatives to share?
If you have used any good Windows Command Prompt alternatives, please feel free share them in the comment.
My favorite console tool is Cygwin.
You missed to include FireCMD – http://www.brainasoft.com/firecmd. Its better than all the four alternatives mentioned here.
Thanks for the heads up, what we were looking for was a free alternative, this tool does look neat unfortunately it’s a paid app. Tho we will give it a try for sure !
PowerCMD is also a paid app! In fact, more expensive than FireCMD.
PowerCMD is free, if you go click the Free link next to the purchase link.
It is a trial copy which works for 30 days. After the trial is expired, it will ask for serial key.
akash is right , i just test it
Nice one http://bliker.github.io/cmder/
http://cmder.net/ is the website to download the program from and the git repo is here: https://github.com/cmderdev/cmder
Just found it, I’m liking it so far. You can still drag and drop into the window unlike PowerCMD (which is a 30 day trial and costs $39.99 normally). The interface looks a lot like cmd.exe in the sense that it doesn’t add large extra buttons and toolbars and is just the console with a few small well laid out icons. It also allows the user to copy and paste into the Console, it has tabs (these show on the bottom of the window by default, fyi), and it has a wide range of options to customize. I’ll update this in case there’s something odd I find but I think I might have found my Windows version to the Console.
I downloaded cmder and am using it now. Unlike other console tools, it displays text from my native langauge(telugu) in the prompt. Cool feature.
I am using ConEmu and PowerCMD, which one do you like?
ConEmu is the base for cmder. We have an article on how good that is.
If you want something a bit different try
[Penteract CMD GUI Creator](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/penteract-cmd-gui-creator/9mswmfz9xv2f).
You create your batch-like files, and then run then as a GUI.