5. August 2012

Console2 for Windows – semi-transparent NodeJS shell, PowerShell or cmd

Update: I switched from Console2 to ConEmu. ConEmu is far more advanced.

Console2 is great little front-end for Windows. It makes PowerShell even more usable. It’s very flexible and you can configure console window to behave like terminal window on MacOS or Linux. It has also support for transparency. It’s simply great. No need to add any more words. Just try it.

I’d like to add few more hints.

Enable transparancy

  • Go to Settings – Appearance – More…
  • Select Window transparency – Alpha
  • Change alpha level of Active and Inacative window.

Result:

Copy on left mouse button click, paste on middle button click

Default configuration of mouse is not very useful. You have to press Shift and Left Mouse to select and copy text. Make small adjustment:

  • Settings – Hotkeys – Mouse
  • Change: Copy/clear selection to Left + Shift
  • Change: Select text to Left

Use Console2 as front-end for NodeJS

You can use Console2 to invoke also NodeJS shell. Just create Tab definition for NodeJS.

  • Go to Settings – Tabs
  • Add NodeJS and set Shell to: “C:\Program Files (x86)\nodejs\node.exe”

Create new Tab with NodeJS profile:

Awesome :)

Posted in Software engineering (Tags: , , , , , , ) | 5 Comments

23. November 2011

Mintty – resizable terminal for Windows

Update 4.11. 2012: Mintty/Cygwin Termina; has also support for transparency.

Update 31.12. 2011: new version of Mintty (see discussion).

Cygwin is great tool for Windows.

E.g. You can create shell script to access windows share via //computer/share_name. This saves a lot of time when you’re domain admin and you need to maintain many computers.

The only BIG drawback of Cygwin for Windows was terminal window. When you work on Mac or Linux you can resize terminal window as you need. Terminal (CMD) for Windows sucks. In default installation you can resize just in one direction. The other option would be to mix Cygwin with PowerShell, but then many things are not working at all.

Good news! Great news! There is new terminal window in Cygwin 1.7.x. It’s application mintty.

Installer will create link to this app with name Cygwin Terminal. It will launch mintty process and you can resize window without problem.

It works fantastic! After so many yeaars it is now possible to use full power of Windows and Linux together in one bundle. (Yes, I know about other terminals like rxvt or X-based stuff, but it required always some extra steps).

Some computers were complaining that /Cygwin-Terminal.ico was not found and I was not able to launch terminal. Solution was easy. Right click on launcher icon and remove icon parameters from Target. The result target command should look like: C:\cygwin\bin\mintty.exe

Hooray! BIG thank you goes to authors of mintty for Windows.

Follow Mintty T.

Posted in Software engineering (Tags: , , , , , ) | 10 Comments

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