The recent official arrival of the command sudo on Windows 11, although its implementation is not really related to the implementation available for Linux and other Unix-like systems, it reinforced Microsoft’s commitment to command-line interfaces. This may come as a bit of a shock to most veterans who saw how the company tried to give said interface minimal emphasis when NT officially arrived in the home environment with Windows XP (yes, there was Windows 2000 before that, but that system was officially aimed at companies).

Windows, whether intentionally or not, eventually created a strong culture among its users of rejecting a command-line interface that was perceived as old, outdated, and difficult. However, despite the alleged stubbornness of Microsoft or its users, the fact is that the command line has stood the test of time very well, and not least because of the enthusiasm shown for it by many users of Linux and Unix and Unix systems. , but also because it has objective advantages over graphical interfaces.

The advantages of the command line compared to graphical interfaces include higher speed of use (after mastering it), greater control over the actions performed, lower consumption of resources and repeatability using scripts. If we make a comparison with Windows 10 or Windows 11, there is another aspect in which the command line is better: consistency.

The last two versions of Microsoft’s operating system, while improving in this area over the years, began to have serious consistency issues that made it difficult to navigate, as each window had a different design than the previous one. This is something that rarely happens with command-line interfaces, as they are usually designed to be fairly consistent, so in the end they may even be more convenient to use for performing certain advanced tasks.

The resurgence of the command line interface (CLI) in Windows has two specific aspects: the extension of PowerShell, which is more of a veteran development than it seems, and above all WSL, the Windows subsystem for Linux that allows Linux distributions to run inside. Windows. Although Linux has improved a lot when it comes to managing it through graphical interfaces, there is still a strong command-line culture among its users, and many tools for software development, administration, or focused on certain advanced tasks continue to rely on the CLI.

The rise of PowerShell and WSL, and the fact that CMD remains a popular tool, meant that Microsoft had to provide some interface that allowed for some centralization. This is where Windows Terminal comes in, which has become the default console in Windows 11 thanks to the facilities it offers to access the various interfaces that can be had in the system.

Due to its history, Windows can give the impression that it is not an operating system made for users. geeks from the command line, but it’s actually quite the opposite. What’s more, there are even various third-party applications that can please those who prefer to use or even work with a terminal, and when it comes down to it, the CLI and GUI complement each other, which remains to be seen. in applications like Visual Studio Code.

Without further ado, I am mentioning some terminal applications for Windows that should be compatible with versions 10 and 11 of the system.

Commander

Cmder is one of the most popular applications in its category among those that support Windows. It is portable, so instead of an installer .exe either .msi, the user will find a ZIP file that they can decompress wherever they want. It is written in C++ and PowerShell, is based on the ConEmu terminal emulator, and is open source as it is published under the MIT license.

Cmder which defaults to sand supports CMD, allows you to easily enable PowerShell, Bash and WSL, it can be said that at least initially it can cover the needs of the most advanced Windows users. The various terminals opened by the user are managed through tabs that can be renamed and include the typical options of this type of application, which usually allow changing the font of the letters and adjusting the colors.

An interesting feature is the Quake mode, which allows you to hide and show the application like in classic Id Software video games, but it may require a certain hand of the user to work properly.

ConEmu

Having already mentioned ConEmu, what less than to continue the list with this application. This terminal application has a “classic” installer format .exe and it’s also open source, but it uses the three-clause BSD license instead of the MIT license (BSD licenses are also allowed, if anyone is interested).

Since this software is the father (or mother, depending on how you see it) of another, it is normal that it shares many features, so that when the user first starts, he finds himself choosing a language, a color scheme, an option enable Quake mode from the start and the option to choose between PowerShell, Bash and WSL interfaces, in addition to being compatible with PuTTY and Cygwin. However, the tabs are by default at the top of the window, not at the bottom.

Other interesting options are the ability to run graphical applications; multi-tab support for consoles, browsers, dashboards and editors; and the many options it provides to customize the app.

The sum of its strengths and features has made ConEmu a popular tool among programmers.

Console Z

Console Z is another portable application that is essentially a wrapper for CMD, although it is also capable of supporting other command line interpreters such as Bash and 4NT. Here we find a fairly vitaminized application at the interface level, which supports tabs and vertical and horizontal divisions.

Other interesting features of Console Z are view grouping, the option zoom in with Ctrl plus mouse wheel spinning, Quake-style console animations, strictly gap-free font renderingconfigurable opacity of text background color and code snippets.

This graphical terminal application is not as powerful as the previous one, but for those who do not leave the classic CMD, it may be enough.

Hyper

And here another open source graphical terminal application, but Hyper has the peculiarity of being built with a controversial framework Electron. This already suggests that we are facing a Web application, but because of this it is able to offer cross-platform support for Windows, Linux and macOS. In case anyone asks, its source code is released under the MIT license.

Those responsible for Hyper say that “the goal of the project is to create a A beautiful and extensible command-line interface user experience based on open web standards. First, we’ll focus primarily on speed, stability, and developing the right API for extension authors. Going forward, we expect the community to come up with innovative add-ons to enhance what could be the simplest, most powerful, and best-tested productivity interface.”

For now, this is an application that requires some advanced programming knowledge, since its configuration is done by editing a text file instead of working with a form window. Among its features, the fact that its extensions are available in npm stands out, so it has a close technological relationship with Node.js.

Smooth terminal

Fluent Terminal is an application that is based on Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and web technologies. Its source code is published under the GPLv3 license, so it can be defined as hardline free software, and it can be obtained both by downloading it from the release section of its GitHub repository and from the Microsoft Store.

Fluent Terminal is an application that is somewhat more aesthetically pleasing than the others on the list and allows you to access CMD, PowerShell, and WSL by opening new tabs and/or new windows. Other points of interest are integrated support for SSH; theme configuration and appearance, import and export of themes; search function; configuring shell profiles to quickly switch between them; extension for VSCode; and a good aesthetic surface treatment of the window of options, which follows the design lines of modern windows.

tabby

Tabby defines itself as a “terminal for the modern era” and is another terminal that is published as open source under the MIT license and offers cross-platform support including Windows, Linux and macOS. An interesting detail is that the Windows installer asks in the first step whether the application will be available only to the running user or to everyone, which is a point in its favor from the point of view of privacy protection.

It is a terminal emulator that tries to focus on cross-platform support. It has integrated SSH client, full Unicode support, SSH file transfer via SFTP and Zmodem, fully configurable keyboard shortcuts, integrated SSH configuration wrapper and secret settingsoptional Quake mode support and support for PowerShell, PS Core, WSL, Git-Bash, Cygwin, Cmder and CMD.

As we can see, Tabby is an application heavily focused on customization, something that it was able to inherit from certain streams that are very strong in the worlds of Linux and Unix operating systems.

Conclusion

As we can see, Windows is a completely suitable operating system geeks command line, even Microsoft itself promoted this aspect with the already mentioned Windows Terminal, an application that allows access to all the interpreters present in the system, to WSL and which is also published as open source, so it is quite in line with the trends in the segment that was always closely related to the world of Unix and open source.