I don't know about you, but I've always wanted a better, sexier shell for Windows. I've messed about with various DOS shell alternatives over the years, without settling on anything. However, today I think I've found something rather promising. It's called Console, it's Open Source, and you can get it at SourceForge.

Once downloaded, unzip to your program files, pin it to your start menu, and suddenly you've got a much nicer windows shell with tabs, transparency, auto-copy on select, background image support, and much more. Shell-tastic, mate :-)

However, that's only the start. This beauty can be configured to work in Linux style by using it in conjunction with Cygwin. Personally, I find the default Cygwin shell rather ugly and clunky, so this console tool makes it much more friendly IMHO (it's more like using Putty). The upshot of all this is that you can have pipes, grep, rar, gunzip, gawk, ls, tail, and any other favourite Linux commands within easy reach, in a friendly shell window, on your Windows box. Cool eh?

To save you digging around, here's a tip. Setting up Console to work with Cywin is easy - just go into the settings, and in the "Tabs" section set the "Bash Shell" shell setting to C:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe --login -i. Updated - the --login -i bit actually means that Cygwin will import the correct paths it needs, and give you a coloured output if that's how your Cygwin is set up.. You'll know it works because when you next launch a new shell it'll greet you with bash-3.2$ rather than Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]. Of course, you'll actually need to download and install Cygwin first.

P.S. When downloading Console, be sure to get V2 beta build 122 or above. Otherwise you get a horrid bash crash where processor usage skyrockets.

P.P.S. Thanks to Ben Kittrell for pointing me in the right direction via his blog.

P.P.P.S. If you're interested in RubyOnRails development, then see this other post