I am a huge fan of the command line! There are so many tasks that are better done from the command line than from a GUI. In Linux, there is of course many great tools for working from the command line. On Windows it is a little harder. To start with the default command line terminal, cmd.exe, is severely limited. Also the command line tools available in Windows are also limited. Here are my collected solutions:

• First of all, you need Console2. Get it and unzip it.
  • Console2 has a nice set of features, but the two biggest for me are that I am not limited to an 80 character wide terminal and I can keep multiple tabs open in one application.
  • You don’t even need any install, just unzip it somewhere convenient. I like to put all tools like this into c:\tools
  • Now, setup it up so you can also have an IPython interface.
  • If you use, MSYS you can setup a tab for that too. You can probably do the same for Cygwin as well.
• Next, get a good set of command line tools. I am giving GnuWin32 a try right now.
  • Get the downloader.
  • Run it.
  • Run download.bat
  • Run install C:\tools