the command line is for lovers
everybody loves a keyboard prompt interface, right? of course. so naturally everybody should love command prompt enhancements. this terrific utility I saw on the lifehacker blog called console makes the whole cli experience even better! here’s how…
- tabbed command prompts - I mean, duh. i’m pretty sure my old school fedora core 4 does this but it’s super super nice to be able to collect my prompts together in one host per session.
- saved profiles - this is where it starts getting useful. I have different consoles with different environmental behaviors - vanilla cmd, environment variables for different development projects which use similar namespace tokens, and my personal customized shell with various macros and aliases defined. it’s extra lame to need a different shortcut for each one of these and with console I can keep them all together and choose which one I want in a new tab.
- different processes - this is really nice. want a cygwin bash shell or plink ssh session? those are just another set of console parameters. I haven’t tried powershell yet but the shells I do use work well.
- some key remappings - I haven’t explored how much flexibility there is here yet but what I DO know is that you can map ctrl+v to paste which honestly is enough for me to convert.
all of this is in the 2.0 releases, by the way, which in about a week of use has given me no problems whatsoever. so go check it out today and start riding the wave of a great aggregated shell experience!