Cmder - A Better Windows Console

Whilst Linux treats console users as first rate citizens and provides many useful and powerful terminal emulators Windows has always lagged behind. This is evermore noticeable now that many developer and IT Ops workloads are done via the terminal. Modern web development and DevOps tooling requires at least some interaction with the terminal, and with the world moving to git for source control developers everywhere are having to embrace consoles.

Whilst Microsoft have traditionally neglected the Windows console they have started to add new features and improvements. For a background on the Windows Console and its architecture check out this blog series. Windows 10 has the best Windows console to date, but there are better out there from 3rd parties and I’ve really got into Cmder.

Cmder is a smart per-configured bundle of the ConEmu emulator software with some extras thrown in. To quote directly from their website:

Cmder is a software package created out of pure frustration over the absence of nice console emulators on Windows. It is based on amazing software, and spiced up with the Monokai color scheme and a custom prompt layout, looking sexy from the start.

It can be run portable on a USB Stick if you wish and it has full Git and Bash support. You can emulate the Windows Command Prompt or PowerShell, Bash, Windows SubSystem for Linux (WSL), even the VS Developer Command Prompt among others. All in a slick feature rich emulator.

It has hundreds of settings that can be tweaked to get everything just the way you like it and it also has the awesome Quake mode so it can slide down from the top of your display.

Support for Cmd, PowerShell, Bash and many more is included out the box, but if you are a Visual Studio user and want to emulate the Developer Command Prompt for VS2017 (reommended) then check out the simple instructions in this guide by Ricardo Serradas on Medium.

I’ve been using it for months and its been stable, performant and has also caught the eye of collegues due to those good looks which make it a pleasure to work in compared to the plain Windows console. Give it a try.