A Better Console for Windows
Anyone who has been to linux land, but is in exile with windows (as I am… MOZY PLEASE MAKE A LINUX CLIENT) misses many things that used to make life much easier. One of those things is the terminal. Gnome-terminal, xterm, terminal, konsole or whatever you used was a joy (once you figured out how to use it) compared to the ancient cmd.exe in windows.
Thankfully, there are many other geeks in exile who have compassion on us. Cygwin allows you to have all the familiar tools on the windows command line (ever type ls, vi or cat on a windows shell?), but that’s not what I am talking about today. I have andLinux installed on my dev machine and have been doing a lot of my work on (xfce) terminal since a rubygem I am using in this particular rails app doesn’t work on windows. Now I am working on a different project that doesn’t require any special gems and am using the mongrel server for windows. I have been so frustrated using cmd.exe that I almost started running this project on the andLinux vm just to get a usable console back.
So I thought about it a bit and it dawned upon me… if these geeks in exile brought us cygwin to cope with our windows environment, surely there is a better console to replace cmd. Sure enough, I found an app on sourceforge called Console (a thoughtful and unambiguous name). I just installed it and absolutely love it. Tab support, shift+left click copying (that spans multiple lines instead of just drawing boxes), transparency… the works! You can even go into Edit -> Settings -> Tabs and specify directory and shell combinations to have at the ready.
Although I rejoice in this small victory, life would be so much easier if mozy just had a linux client, then I wouldn’t have to work so hard at getting windows to jump through all the hoops that linux does out of the box.