If the stark black screen and white text of the Windows command console doesn't do it for you, you might want to check out Color Console. It's a free application that has all the features you'd expect from a basic Windows command prompt, and then some. For example, you can change your color scheme to yellow, orange, blue, or "matrix," which is a custom black and green skin.

While the color feature is nice, Color Console also has a few tricks that are a bit more functional. For example you can open up multiple console windows in a tabbed interface. And you can easily copy text from the console and paste it into any Windows application. There's even a beta print feature that will let you print the contents of a console window in full color.

[via Brown Thoughts]

Have I mentioned that I use the command line a lot? Yeah, I'm pretty sure I have. At any rate, one of the most useful features of the Windows command line, which I'm sure many of you use very day, is tab completion. In short, instead of having to type out an entire long filename, you can just type the beginning of it, press tab, and its name will be completed for you. This is especially handy for file and folder names that have spaces in them, which can otherwise be a pain. In case this is new to you, you can acquaint yourself with the feature with this guide from Microsoft blogger Derek Dysart. Oh, and in case you use Windows 2000, for which this feature is mysteriously disabled by default, Dysart tells you the magic registry setting for turning it on.

[Via Lifehacker]

I spend about half my time in Windows with at least one command prompt window open, and usually more than one. Some things just go smoother with a CLI to work with, though that obviously depends a lot on what kind of computer user you are. But after a few days this week of having three consoles open constantly I began to wonder about tabs. My web browser has tabs, my text editor has tabs, why not my console? A Google search turned up a few-but not many-options, and the winner was called, simply, Console. It's an open source project that gives you a nice, configurable, tabbed interface to keep all your consoles in. It customization options are plentiful, letting you choose fonts, colors, transparency, background images, shortcut keys, even cursors. You can also set up as many different kinds of consoles you want-you're not just limited to the standard Windows command prompt. You can run any Windows command line app in its own tab, e.g Windows PowerShell (Monad), Cygwin, your favorite programming language's interactive prompt, or even Zork, and you can set each one up with its own keyboard shortcut. It's not a perfect app, though: it's easy to use, but some of the settings are cryptic and documentation is non-existent, and though I wouldn't call it a memory hog, it does take up more memory than the regular Windows prompt, especially if you're using several tabs and some of the eye-candy options. But it is a very cool app, and one that could easily become an indispensable part of your workflow. Oh, and it stores its configuration in a .xml file, which makes it portable-storage-friendly. Since the Sourceforge download pages can be a bit confusing, here's a direct download link to the latest beta version (or you can grab the latest stable version here).