If you are a developer, programmer or just some ordinary guy who uses the Command Line Interface to do various tasks and routines on their computer. Then you might find the default Command Prompt commonly known as CMD to be lacking some friendly and handy features.
Some feature that you might need are as follows:
- The ability to manage multiple instances of the interface in one window.
- The ability to use the keyboard shortcuts such as Ctrl+C to copy and Ctrl+V to paste.
So, here are my top 3 Command Line Interface alternatives to replace the default command prompt.
Cygwin
Cygwin is a POSIX-compatible environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows. Its goal is to allow programs of Unix-like systems to be recompiled and run natively on Windows with minimal source code modifications by providing them with the same underlying POSIX API they would expect in those systems.
It can be described as a command-line interface for the Windows operating systems. Users who preferred this alternative usually like the Unix environment feel that it provides. Its ease in the installation process is a significant factor in being a favorite of many because it only takes a few clicks to install and it’s ready for use. Some users recommend Cygwin because it offers a good environment that has a lot of advanced features that can be learned.
ConEmu
ConEmu is a free and open-source tabbed terminal emulator for Windows. ConEmu presents multiple consoles and simple GUI applications as one customizable GUI window with tabs and a status bar. Its intuitive GUI makes it user-friendly and easy to use that fits the user’s personal preferences.
Cmder
Cmder — pronounced “Commander” — is a pre-configured software package that provides you with an awesome terminal emulator, and the best shell you’ll ever have on Windows.
Cmder is built on the powerful ConEmu terminal emulator to provide the best terminal experience on Windows, it uses the amazing Clink to provide a bash-like prompt using GNU’s readline, and adds a bit of batch sugar to add things like alias support, and also comes with Git on the full edition.
Even a good command-line interface doesn’t have all the features that we’d want to have. But a combination of the others can make it the best. Listed above are the 3 alternatives of the command prompt with a brief description of each. The features of each range from the ability to be used for complex scripting language to simple GUI to enhance the user’s overall productivity.
So if you are looking for a command-line interface alternative, you can review each capability and explore more of its advanced features.
