Console or Command Line Interface has been man’s best friend ever since the evolution of computers and other devices. Although GUIs are simpler to use, there are some tasks that cannot be done on UI, and you have to rely on black terminal windows for that. If you are an avid console user, you might love this tool called CMDER. CMDER is a free, portable console emulator for Windows. By console emulator, we mean that I can wrap around CMD and provide much more features and an intuitive experience.
Console Emulator for Windows PC
The list of features that come built into CMDER goes on, and the developer states that this tool was created out of pure frustration over the absence of nice console emulators on Windows. If you primarily use CMD or PowerShell, then you might find this tool very useful with its extended features, keyboard shortcuts, and aliases.
There are two download options available, mini and full. The full variant comes included with Git for Windows. Which means you can readily use git commands and some Unix commands on your computer as well.
Since CMDER is an emulator, you can literally run any shell of your choice inside it. Moreover, it supports tabs which let you open more than one shell window in the same program. To open a new tab, press Ctrl+T on your keyboard. Whenever you open a new tab, you can specify the shell that you want to initialize in that tab. You can also specify the start-up directory and credentials if you are running that tab as another user.
On my machine, I can use CMDER to run CMD, PowerShell and Git Bash at the same time in different tabs. Another great feature that I use is console split. You can open more than one consoles by splitting the screen into even halves. This comes handy when you want to use more than one console without changing the tabs again and again.
CMDER is extensively customizable and offers a long list of settings that can be changed and customized. You can easily modify the look and feel by changing color, positioning, and fonts. There is an option where you can select a background image for the terminal, and it looks very cool.
Apart from that, you can easily setup environment variables aliases from the settings itself. You can even import them if you have them already specified somewhere.
CMDER supports quite a lot of keyboard shortcuts that can be customized as well. You can setup copy/paste from the console which is quite difficult to do in other programs. Apart from that the tool can install keyboard hooks and seize keyboard keys. The list of important keyboard shortcuts is available on CMDER website, or you can view most of them from Keys and Macro settings.
CMDER download
CMDER is a great utility for developers, coders or anyone who uses console a lot. Again, this is not a shell but an emulator that can run any shell inside it. You can easily execute CMD, PowerShell, Git commands using CMDER. The tool comes with a lot of features and can be customized to any level. Even if you don’t understand any complex terms mentioned in settings, you can Google them or safely skip them.
The tool is under 10 MB (mini variant) and is completely portable. You can carry it around or upload it to the cloud, and your settings and history will always be preserved. Click here to download CMDER.
