Contents

Introduction

If you use Windows, you are missing out on a very useful tool that is available in OSX and Linux: a solid command line environment. Sure, there's the command shell (CMD) and PowerShell, but these are pretty insufficient. This page will show you how to install Console2.

First, download Console2. The download is a zip file, so open your downloads folder and double click the downloaded Console2 file to unpack it. You should now see a folder called "Console2". Copy this, then navigate to "Local Disk (C:)" and paste the copied folder. In Windows 8 and 10, you can find "Local Disk (C:)" under "This PC" on the left bar of any Windows Explorer.

To open, navigate into the Console2 folder that you copied in C:. Double click the file Console.exe. Once that's opened, I would suggest pinning it to your application bar (Windows 7) or start screen (Windows 8).

There are two things you need to do to use Console2: tell it where to find the shell it uses to issue commands and tell it what directory to start up in by default. To set these, go to "Edit" → "Settings...". In the settings window, paste the following in the text box next to "Shell": C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\bin\bash.exe. For "Startup dir", click the "..." button to the right of the textbox and navigate to your home directory in the window that pops up and hit "OK". You should see something that looks like C:\Users\hfeild show up in the text box (hfeild is my username on that machine).

These are the only two settings you really need to set, but you can also play around with color schemes, fonts, and what toolbars are shown.