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Modernising the Windows Console

My work laptop is stuck in Windows-land really, because of some required corporate applications. Lately I’ve been writing a fair bit of Python, and using the coloredlogs extension to the logging module to produce pretty logging from my code. Except on Windows, where the standard CMD prompt doesn’t understand ANSI colour codes, which is kind of a pain.

There are a few solutions that patch the default command prompt, to add back in ANSI support (DOS always had it available, way back when), but they all seemed a bit hacky.

So I switched to ConEmu, which provides a huge list of features, including ANSI colour support, tabs, all kinds of display modes, transparency, xterm-style cut&paste, and a canned list of contained applications, including CMD, Powershell, Chocolatey, Cygwin and that funny shell with all the environment set up that Visual Studio uses. Of course, you can also add your own.

Now I have a nicer-looking and nicer-acting console, and my Python logging colours work properly!

After playing with that for a while, I noticed the option to enable Clink inside ConEmu. Clink adds a large range of bash-style features to Cmd itself, like saved history, incremental history search and fancy completion, as well as simple things like being able to press Ctrl-V to paste, and readline editing (emacs keys to edit the input).