better command for Windows? [closed]

Question

While I grew up using MSWindows, I transitioned to my much-loved Mac years ago. I don't want to start a flame war here on operating systems. I do, however, want a terminal a litle closer to what I'm used to.

I'm not asking for full POSIX support - I don't have the patience to install Cygwin - but I miss tabbed terminals, being able to easily cut and paste, and my good friends ls, mkdir, rm, et al. (For these last ones, I could always put .bat files on my path, but that's going to get old fast.)

Anybody have a terminal application for MSWindows XP ?

Answer 1

If you are a bit of a Pythonista then iPython is tough to beat. It has some of the more common shell commands coded in (i.e. ls, pwd, cd etc.), can also run any other shell command by prefixing with '!' (i.e. !latex file.tex) but also is a full Python shell with history, tab-complete, multiline editor support, logging etc. etc.

Moreover, you can install iPython back on your UNIX boxes as well as Windows meaning your environment can follow wherever you go.

Answer 2

PowerShell is amazing, however for anything other than the most basic commands there is a learning curve when switching from bash etc.

I went back to using cygwin.

Answer 3

I've never found anything I like more than Cygwin.

I also went ahead and installed Cygwin/X w/ Openbox so I can get something like this:

It's got multiple workspaces inside the main Openbox window so I can easily have up to 20 non-overlapping xterms that I can easily cycle through.

Answer 4

There is a new-ish open source Console Emulator called cmder. It looks really nice and has some advanced features that make it nicer to use. You can also use powershell with it. Best of all, it's portable!

Answer 5

PowerShell is worth looking into.

Answer 6

Some more options:

MSYS: a Minimal SYStem providing a POSIX compatible Bourne shell environment, with a small collection of UNIX command line tools. Primarily developed as a means to execute the configure scripts and Makefiles used to build Open Source software, but also useful as a general purpose command line interface to replace Windows cmd.exe.

GNU utilities for Win32: ports of common GNU utilities to native Win32. In this context, native means the executables do only depend on the Microsoft C-runtime (msvcrt.dll) and not an emulation layer like that provided by Cygwin tools.