Looking for a better Windows XP command-line interface. The Visual Studio Command Prompt isn't near as nice as the Linux/OSX terminals.
Thoughts?
edit:
Answers: Console on Sourceforge, and the Windows Powershell. Thanks, I'll go dig them up and evaluate them. The Cygwin package is too much overhead for what I want.
edit2: Looks like the Windows Powershell for now. Its copy&paste functionality isn't great, but MS supports it.
Take a look at Console2 http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/
It's features:
"multiple tabs, text editor-like text selection, different background types, alpha and color-key transparency, configurable font, different window styles"
I see you put "powershell" as one of your tags. Maybe you could help direct our answers by explaining what you don't like about PowerShell as a replacement for cmd.exe?
As has your question been tagged, have you tried Windows PowerShell? It's paradigm is based on unix's pipes but instead of outputting text the processes output .Net objects.
Cygwin is a good alternative. You can run Bash or other shells on Windows. You get most of your classic Linux/UNIX commands, shell scripting, etc. You even get the GNU compilers and can avoid Visual Studio if you wish. From Cygwin, you can access your regular Windows programs, drives, etc so there's rarely a reason to go back to cmd.exe.
If you are just looking to automate tasks via shell scripts (not interactive shell), then you should look at Windows Scripting Host. WSH is a feature-rich scripting environment for Windows that comes pre-installed on all modern versions of Windows.
I've been combining putty, cygwin, screen, and zsh(not bash) lately. I like a lot of the features of zsh, like autocd which and auto-pushd, which put the directories you change into onto the directory stack without having to type pushd. I also like that fact that multiple shells share history, and don't overwrite each other. Screen lets me run multiple zsh shells in one putty window. You can get zsh and screen from the cygwin site. I run: putty -cygterm screen
You'll also need the patched version of putty that has the -cygterm support.
I'm not clear on what you mean by Linux/OSX command prompts being "nice". If you just mean that they provide more utilities, I usually install Windows Services for Unix to add common programs like grep and vi.