- Introduction
- Console Windows in Windows NT
- Console Windows Advanced Management
- Quickly Attaining the Most Convenient Layout of Console Windows
- Keep Console Windows Always-on-Top
- New Ways of Keeping Currently Unused Console Windows
- Quickly Place a Console Window to Desired Monitor
- Conclusion
- Useful Links
Introduction
Though
Windows® is an operating system with graphical user interface (GUI), it also supports applications using a
system console for input/output, which have a textual (text-based) interface. Such applications (and their windows) are called
console. There is a great number of popular applications that use textual interface:
Far Manager,
Apache web server for Windows,
MySQL DBMS server for Windows,
Cygwin-based applications, most cross-platform ports from
Unix/Linux, and many others.
The most well-known and typical example of a console window is the
Windows Command Prompt facility which is the instance of the command-line shell available in
Windows. Command-line shell is the integral part of any modern operating system: it's used whenever a large vocabulary of internal commands or external command-line utilities, coupled with a wide (or arbitrary) range of options, can be entered more rapidly as text than with a pure GUI. Moreover, considering the ability to compound separate commands into a batch scripts that can automatically do sophisticated jobs, it's obvious that command-line shell is a powerful, flexible and fast facility which is widely used by programmers and system administrators, in engineering and scientific environments, and by technically advanced personal computer users. Due to such popularity, console windows are also known as
command prompt windows (or
CMD windows because the filename of shell's executable is
cmd.exe).
Console Windows in
Windows NT
In
Win9x product line (
Windows® 95/98/ME) console windows were processed identically to GUI ones but in
WinNT line (
Windows® NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista) console windows' processing was carried out into a separate subsystem, not available for common applications. Its "separate" nature is especially obvious in
Windows XP, where console windows
do not support extended visual styles of XP interface themes. According to the same reason, console windows were not extended by
Actual Tools utilities and no advanced opportunities were available for them.
Nevertheless, starting from version 5.0,
Actual Tools software engineers have developed a unique technology which finally allows the extended manipulations with console windows in
WinNT product line. Though some features
are still not accessible due to a specific nature of console windows, the most important and helpful
Actual Tools functions now can be easily applied to console windows as well as to common ones: minimize to tray/on screen, keep always-on-top, resize, align, change priority/affinity, etc. Moreover, all these features can be triggered in various ways (both automatically and manually) and are available either in
Default settings or in
Specific settings, which you can create just for a particular kind of console windows (e.g. all
Apache web server windows).
Console Windows Advanced Management
1. Quickly Attaining the Most Convenient Layout of Console Windows
It is always pleasurable to work with computer where all important windows are placed in order so that you can easily find them. If you often use different console windows and want to open them where you indicate - our
Actual Window Manager program is made for you! With its help, you can set position and size of any console window automatically at its startup.
To develop a better understanding, let's take the
Command Prompt window mentioned above and assume we want it to open positioned at the
top-center of the desktop with a small displacement to the bottom and sized to
640 pixels in width and
480 pixels in height. Here is the step-by-step instruction on how to achieve this:
- Create specific settings for the Command Prompt window (view the live demo on how to do this). Finally, its Target Window pane should look as follows:
Figure 1. Target Window values for the Command Prompt windows
Please note that all console windows share the same Window class value (ConsoleWindowClass), so we should also enable both Window caption and Program criteria (as in the Figure 1) to define more exactly that just created settings are for Command Prompt windows only.
- Go to the Position property sheet and mark there the Align at startup to check box in the Change Window Position Automatically group, then select the top-center alignment and specify, for example, 50 pixels as Vertical shift value:
Figure 2. Align at Startup values for the Command Prompt windows
- Go to the Size property sheet and mark there the At startup to check box in the Resize Window Automatically group, then specify 640 as Width value and 480 as Height value, then select pixels as measure units (the other way is to click the Predefined button and select the 640x480 predefined size to automatically fill these values):
Figure 3. Resize at Startup values for the Command Prompt windows
- Save the configuration to apply the just made tunings.
Spending just a few seconds (
just once!) on making some specific settings for often used console windows in the manner described above will save seconds (
then minutes, then hours!) of your precious time which you are used to spend on tedious manual manipulations every time you open them.
You can also change the size and position of any console window on-the-fly clicking
Resize 
and
Align 
title buttons, choosing the corresponding
window menu items or using
hotkeys (<Win-Z> for
Resize and <Win-A> for
Align by default).
2. Keep Console Windows Always-on-Top
If you have such console windows which are used for monitoring some activity (well-known
ping utility, for example) and as such must always remain visible you will certainly prefer them to stay on top of all the others. Use the
Stay Always-On-Top action, which will allow you keeping the selected window on top of other open windows so that it's always accessible and never covered by them - even when it becomes inactive.
Figure 4. Keep monitoring console windows (such as
ping, telnet, netstat etc.) always-on-top
It is an ideal solution when working with multiple windows open at once (as it happens every day). You can select a window to
Stay Always-on-Top all the time, so it never falls behind another window.
3. New Ways of Keeping Currently Unused Console Windows
While working with several console windows you usually have to move the currently unused ones out of your way without closing them to keep them operational in background (when they become idle for some reason or you just need to refer to some more urgent affairs). The options described below can be especially useful to manipulate different server windows (e.g. already mentioned above
Apache, MySQL etc.) because of their inherent "running in background" nature.
Actual Window Manager presents you several options to do it in the most advanced ways:
Title buttons are the fastest and the easiest way to activate the functions described above, but
Actual Window Manager lets you use other alternative triggers, both
manual and
automatic ones.
4. Quickly Place a Console Window to Desired Monitor
If you have several monitors connected to your computer, the
Move to Monitor action can be extremely useful to manage console windows in multiple display environment. With the help of this action, you will be able to:
Conclusion
Starting from
version 5.0,
Actual Window Manager introduces a unique technology which finally allows the extended manipulations with console windows in
WinNT series of
Microsoft® Windows® operating systems. Due to this technological breakthrough, now you can operate console windows as easy as usual ones in many advanced ways that
Actual Window Manager offers: minimize them to tray, make always-on-top, roll them up, easily position and resize them, change their priorit
