ConEmu [1] has made CLI on Windows much more tolerable for me.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/

Conemu with powershell and PSReadline [1] has made things a lot nicer.

[1] https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine

ConEmu is great; never looked back!

> Seeing things like this gives me hope that one day Windows will be a first class os for web development.

For many of us it already is.

For Emacs users on Windows, I've found Eshell (M-x eshell)[0] to be much preferable to the normal command window for most tasks.

[0]: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.ht...

You can't maximize it, but you can set its width and height. Right click in taskbar -> Properties -> Layout. There are settings for size, position and buffer size. I have mine the size of the whole window and with the biggest possible buffer, as well as a more readable font.

windows is a first class os for web development. what is it lacking? i have coded in ruby, python, java and go for the web.

also used different web servers including apache and tomcat.

For me the lack of many unix tools is a killer and cygwin doesn't cut it. Many build scripts assume a unixy environment and windows is flat-out not supported. Lack of a proper package manager also makes installing and configuring workstations a hassle.

It depends on what build scripts you are talking about.

We use Ant, Maven, MSBuild, Powershell, all without UNIX assumptions.

You can configure workstations via Active Directory.

Microsoft is not to blame if developers still insist in having .exe installers instead of adopting .msi packages.

I don't think the package manager matters to be honest.

In python I use pip.

In ruby I use rubygems.

In java I use maven for dependencies.

in node.js I use npm.

So really, even in ubuntu or macosx you will use theses tools.

I've tried having all these installed, and having them all in my %PATH%, along with msys and the platform sdk and so on, but i found I just ended up with my PATH env var being truncated because I went over the environment block size limit. I've given up pretending windows is unixy and ditched it in favor of homebrew on osx

There might limitations, definitely. But move to OSX just because the $PATH has limitations seems a bit overboard.

There are other ways around it.

And you can install them all from chocolatey, if you need a package manager manager.

I just fire up the powershell ISE. I'd love a quake style terminal that's just this things console in borderless mode.

ConEmu (https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/) + Quake Mode = Awesome :)

THIS. ConEmu + Scoop (http://scoop.sh) has made using Windows much much much more productive for me.

I used to use something called puTTYcyg when I used cygwin on windows. It seems that it's no longer maintained, but it was a decent terminal for Windows without going whole-hog X11 in cygwin.