It seems that the windows world is not as enamoured with the shell (terminal) as the Unix/Linux world. One of the first things i do on my Windows box is install Cygwin as the tools are absolutely fantastic. However, the smaller open source community of the Microsoft world hasn't produced much in this regard.
... please prove me wrong, I'm a Microsoft fan...

So, I spent a good while looking for a better Windows shell. All I wanted was to be able to Cut&Paste like the rest of my apps and have tabbed windows that allow me to use my various shells like
  • Command Prompt
  • cygwin
  • Git  Bash
  • PowerShell
  • Visual Studio Command Prompt
  • MongoDb Shell
  • NodeJs
Thankfully that is exactly what i found in Console2 - available for download  from Sourceforge.



What we get here is an easy to use shell that allows you to create pre-defined tabs with environmental variables set to launch the individual environments that you may need.

There is no install utility, so simply unpack the executables to a folder and add that folder to your command path.

To add a new shell: goto Edit>Settings and click on Tabs and add tab for each environment that you want. 

These are the settings U use for a few of the shells mentioned above. FOr most you just point to their installation folder, but some need a few extra commands (like Visual Studio command prompt)


GitBash
Title:            GitBash
Icon:            C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\etc\git.ico
Shell:            C:\Windows\SysWOW64\cmd.exe /c ""C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin\sh.exe" --login -i"
Startup Dir:   c:\code

Visual Studio Command
Title:            VS Command
Icon:            
Shell:            %comspec% /k ""C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat"" x86
Startup Dir:   c:\

Powershell
Title:             Powershell
Icon:            
Shell:            %SystemRoot%\syswow64\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe
Startup Dir:   c:\code