
Here’s a screen shot of my External Tools menu in Visual Studio 2019 and you can see Explorer, ConEmu and Windows Terminal both in user mode and admin represented there. Regardless of which terminal tool you use, it's very useful to add a few links to external shells, and other tools onto your Tools menu via the External Tools feature in Visual Studio. These days other tools like Windows Terminal and ConEmu are more popular than Console2 at the time when this post was originally written. You can basically create custom shells for anything that has a CLI. This works, but gets tedious after a while.īTW, if you need any convincing on using a console host other than the Command or Powershell terminals directly check out Scott Hanselman’s blog post from a few years back (he has several actually) – he talks about Console2 which was a popular shell replacement at the time, if for nothing else than the easier cut and paste features, but you also get multiple tabbed command shells and support for pre-configured shells of Command Prompts, PowerShell, Bash etc.

My typical workflow for this has been to click on my ConEmu shortcut on the Windows shortcut menu and then copy and paste the path to my project that’s buried 5 levels down from the root usually. This isn’t exactly news, but I’ve been doing a lot more work with the command line these days from using build tools, file monitors, local Web servers, running Git, to doing Cordova builds and so on.
