WinConsole - What is it?
CO3 Software WinConsole is a wrapper application around the Microsoft Windows command prompt. It provides a flexible editor like terminal interface similar in concept to Xterm, the Gnome Terminal and Konsole terminal emulators on Linux.
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You can download a fully functional evaluation version from the Downloads section. The price of a single license is US$ 28.98.
Supported platforms
Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista.
WinConsole should work without any problems on previous Windows platforms: 95, 98, 2000, ME. However, it has not been tested on these previous Windows versions, and is not officially supported on them.
Product support
Support for WinConsole is through the Google group http://groups.google.com/group/winconsole. The support site also contains a User's Guide and a Quick Help section.
Features
In contrast to cmd.exe, you can- use the mouse as in any other editor
- select, copy, paste and search
- resize the window
- change the font and other editor preferences
- change directories through a Windows Explorer like folder tree-view
How does it work? Cmd.exe vs WinConsole
This section is a somewhat technical explanation of how WinConsole is implemented.
WinConsole wraps cmd.exe to provide a flexible editor like interface for the command prompt. It passes commands to cmd.exe and captures the resulting output (STDOUT and STDERR). Since it uses cmd.exe directly to execute commands, everything that works in the command prompt window will also work in WinConsole: Batch files, redirection using > and <, 'dir', 'echo', 'mkdir', etc. (Note that WinConsole actually wraps the program referenced by the "ComSpec" Windows environment variable. Hence, on Windows 95 and 98 it uses command.com instead of cmd.exe.)
WinConsole is designed to facilitate the use of command line utilities and compilers (such as GCC and the Visual Studio 2005 Express edition.) Hence, it does not provide persistent access or interactive user input to cmd.exe. This means that the command 'del myFile.txt' works as expected. However, 'del myFolder' will result in the output 'myFolder\*, Are you sure (Y/N)?'. Since WinConsole is not designed for persistent access, answering 'Y' will have no effect.
As previously mentioned, everything that works in the command prompt window (that does not require persistent access) will also work in WinConsole. There are however two commands that are pre-processed by WinConsole: 'cd' and 'run'.
The 'cd' command is implemented internally by WinConsole and is not actually passed on to cmd.exe. This is done to enable switching between directories through the directory tree-view.
Consider the command 'myFile.txt'. It will open the file myFile.txt with the default application for opening text files. Similarly, the command 'explorer myFolder' will open the folder with Windows Explorer. In both cases WinConsole will wait until the application terminates. As long as the application is running WinConsole will not send additional commands to cmd.exe, because it is still waiting for the previous command to be completed. If this is not what you wanted, then you can click on the "Stop waiting for process (Ctrl+Z)" menu item in the "File" menu. Note that WinConsole will not terminate the process, it will just abandone it. Alternatively, you can use the 'run' command to tell WinConsole to not wait for the process to finish, e.g: 'run myFile.txt' and 'run explorer myFolder'. Note that 'run' is not a cmd.exe command, it is specific to WinConsole to enable additional functionality.
Adding commands
Under Linux placing a program in "/usr/bin" will make it automatically available as a command in the terminal. On Windows, placing and executable in the system folder ("c:\windows\system32") will make the program available as a command on the command prompt. For example, if you place WinConsole.exe into "c:\windows\system32", then that will make 'winconsole' a recognized command. Now you can start a new instance of WinConsole by entering the command 'run winconsole' into WinConsole. You can also pass the start-up directory as a command line argument to the new WinConsole window: 'run winconsole c:\windows'.
However, you don't generally want to place programs in the system directory. A better solution is to use batch files. Batch files in the system directory also become available as commands. The above can be achieved using the batch file "winconsole.bat" that contains the line c:\path\to\winconsole.exe %1