ASCII eye-candy:

I use a lot of command prompts on a day to day basis.  And with several source code enlistments on my machine each requiring different environments, it's sure hard to keep track of them all.  Yeah, there's some background color/font/title tricks that you can use, but that makes life just bearable, and is far from ideal.

 

That's where Console comes in.  Console is a terminal replacement that adds all manner of goodies that you've been missing from GnomeTerminal or OS X's Terminal.app: transparency, sweet looking cursors, better copy/paste shortcuts, etc.

 

I've been using Console for a long time, and have generally been quite happy with it, but last week I decided to check out the latest demo of Console 2.0, their upcoming release... and was ecstatic to finally see support for tabs!  Say what you will about tabs being the new "in" thing, but it does matters.  For one thing, I can now have all of my command prompts running in a single Console session, meaning I don't have to Alt-Tab through 10 different identical process icons or try to remember which one to pick from the grouped taskbar icon.  Plus, each of my envionments still has transparency with different tinting and custom titles/icons, and I have instant access to a new pre-configured environment of type 1-9 via the keyboard using Ctrl-F1 ... Ctrl-F9 as well as easy keyboard access between tabs via the standard Ctrl-Tab/Ctrl-Shift-Tab, and Ctrl-<number>. 

 

Kudos to the Marko Bozikovic and the rest of the Console team for making a terminal replacement for Windows that does't suck!  :)