Up until recently I’ve been using git prompt for Windows to get myself a half decent terminal while at work. I also followed this to give it a little extra.

It’s been great. I’ve been able to use vi, ssh (without putty!) run Python & Ruby scripts sanely and of course, I’ve been able to have fun with piping.

A little while ago a colleague introduced me to cmder. At first I wasn’t convinced but now it’s all I use. For my usage it’s pretty comparable to my git prompt, but, it adds better support for copy/paste (ctrl+shift+c/v) in the terminal and tabs :)

Out the box it doesn’t complete things in your PATH variable but this can be changed by editing cmder\config\settings

# name: Executable match style
# type: enum
# Changes how Clink will match executables when there is no path separator on
# the line. 0 = PATH only, 1 = PATH and CWD, 2 = PATH, CWD, and directories. In
# all cases both executables and directories are matched when there is a path
# separator present.
exec_match_style = 0

I was going to set exec_match_style to 1 to allow it to complete CWD too but I’m used to using ./ anyway set decided to use 0 instead.

The two downsides are that ~ doesn’t map to “home” and you switch drives DOS style:
> E:

In the git prompt you can do it in a *nixy way:
$ cd /e/

I find myself using it more often than the git prompt; sometimes I’d still drop into PowerShell. Now I use cmder for everything, even doing an IIS reset…

All in all I’m pretty happy with it so we’ll see how it goes.