Quake Mode Console for Visual Studio - Open a Command Prompt with a hotkey

January 21, 2015 Comment on this post [45] Posted in Tools | VS2012 | VS2013 | VS2015

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Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Comment on this post [45]

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January 21, 2015 12:52

OMG, Carnac... I was looking for such a util for ages and all others sucked.. no idea how I managed to not come by it sooner! Thank you!

Donatas

January 21, 2015 12:53

That Phil Haack guy is so cool and dreamy.

-totally not Phil Haack. Unbiased observer.

Not Haacked

January 21, 2015 13:05

Hm, my old Quake-style gravatar would have been more fitting.. :)
So, would this open a cmd prompt, or can it be configured to open a PoSh-prompt?

Frank Quednau

January 21, 2015 13:06

Frank - Of course!

Scott Hanselman

January 21, 2015 14:00

How did you record the gif? I'm using ShareX, but always looking for (better?) alternatives.

Dennis van der Stelt

January 21, 2015 14:06

When you're in GitHub for Windows just press ~ and you'll automatically get a new command prompt

It doesn't work on a French keyboard (AZERTY). On those keyboards the upper-left key is '²' (not sure why someone thought we needed this character directly accessible). The '~' character is accessible through AltGr+2, but since it's a dead char, it doesn't work as a shortcut key...

Thomas Levesque

January 21, 2015 14:21

So to open a console, you have to use...
~ in Quake
Alt+Space in VS
F12 in IE and Chrome

Life would be easier if all of them could agree to use a standard shortcut.

Stefan Offermann

January 21, 2015 14:23

I don't think 'Alt+Space' is a good key choice, as it just takes a shortcut that is reserved by Windows since at least 3.0: It should open the system menu, as it always did.

Bert Huijben

January 21, 2015 14:23

Thanks to Mats for building this extension! Installed.

Marius Schulz

January 21, 2015 15:23

And Microsoft should decide if we should use command line or PowerShell...

OnurG

January 21, 2015 15:34

I just discovered recently that ConEmu has a quake mode. It makes ConEmu appear from the top of the screen, and hides/show it with the Ctrl+` shortcut (as in Sublime Text). The shortcut is configurable.

You can see how to activate this mode here: http://tech.pro/blog/1239/conemu-quake-style-consoles

Melchior Corgié

January 21, 2015 15:52

Not working for me - The parameter is incorrect (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070057 (E_INVALIDARG).

VS2013

John Francis

January 21, 2015 16:19

On UK keyboards its the `¬¦ key (top left, underneath the Esc key).

Richard Price

January 21, 2015 16:27

That key (tilde?) is not available on various international keyboards. For example as a kid, playing Quake, I could never try the various che... options, because I could not access the console.

El Dorko

January 21, 2015 17:06

Why do you need a command prompt at a project's location so often?

Jon

January 21, 2015 17:18

"A lot of people don't realize that you can Shift-Right-Click on a folder in Windows Explorer and you'll automatically get a "Command Prompt Here" menu item!"

Count me among them. Thank you so much.

(Not a great fan of non-discoverable features)

Rob G

January 21, 2015 17:27

@El dorko - see Richard Price's comment right above yours.

Rob G

January 21, 2015 17:53

Awesome!! Just installed works like a charm!

Great work Mad and Scott!!

jalpesh vadgama

January 21, 2015 19:12

I always opened a command prompt in a specific folder by typing cmd and pressing enter in the Explorer address box. So I'd right-click my project and Open Folder in File Explorer, then type cmd and press Enter in the address box. It opens the command prompt with the path set to the current folder.

Andy

January 21, 2015 19:22

Submitted a pull request to have an option to always open at the solution level if desired, hopefully he'll accept it, I can't think of a reason in my development why I'd want to be at the project level.

Chris

January 21, 2015 19:27

I'm using a conEmu prompt. If I make the command: c:\path\to\conemu\prompt it doesn't open in the project/solution directory. I've been trying to pass it the solution path via Command arguments with $(SolutionPath), but that doesn't seem to work. Any suggestions or thoughts?

Ben

January 21, 2015 20:38

I normally use WinKey+x -> a. Downside is it defaults to \windows\system32. Upside is it's running as admin. I also set it to launch powershell instead of cmd.

Dan Tower

January 21, 2015 20:43

Anything Scott, Phil and Mads like is cool, but you can already do the same with Visual Studio's "External Tools" in the Tools menu. I have a "CMD Here" item, mapped to Ctrl+`, which opens a command prompt to the path of the currently selected item (file, project, etc.). Using external tools, this would also get saved in your exported settings when moving to a new machine or upgrading to future VS versions. (The extension's settings may as well -- I don't know.)

Scott

January 21, 2015 22:43

@Ben - The extension forwards the directory path as the current working directory of a newly spawned process, rather than a token like $(SolutionPath). You can get the working directory of the ConEmu process with %ConEmuBaseDir% from within ConEmu, so you can use this to get your shell set. So, if you have a ConEmu task named "{PowerShell}", configure the extension to pass along

/cmd {PowerShell}

to the ConEmu64.exe. Then, within that task, have command simliar to

powershell.exe -Command "& %ConEmuBaseDir%"

and you should get your PowerShell process set to the correct directory.

Bo Jordan

January 22, 2015 2:03

@Andy i do the same thing, it works great! It also works for 'powershell' to :)

Shannon

January 22, 2015 5:18

wow, thanks for sharing

Harshani Nawarathna

January 22, 2015 5:36

The Productivity Power tools command extension has a open command prompt feature that opens a command prompt in the selected location. Although I don't Think you can map it to anything but cmd.exe

Niclas Lindgren

January 22, 2015 16:51

1. How can I set to powershell ? ( https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/4e84e2cf-2d6b-472a-b1e2-b84932511379 gives an error - however it can be installed in VS)

2. With which tool did you make the animated gif?

Thank you

Ignat Andrei

January 22, 2015 19:32

TIP: A lot of people don't realize that you can Shift-Right-Click on a folder in Windows Explorer and you'll automatically get a "Command Prompt Here" menu item!

Awesome tip ;)

John

January 23, 2015 3:41

I always loved the Quake console as well.

On my Mac I use TotalTerminal to get the same effect.

I wish it were easy to get the same thing in Windows.

DWAK

January 23, 2015 16:54

As usual is a pleasure to read your blog.

Juan Calos Ruiz

January 23, 2015 19:22

I don't need a command prompt here very often but I do seem to want to open File Explorer here quite a bit. Good news is there's already an Open Containing Folder command in Visual Studio, I bound it to Ctrl+Shift+Alt+O (because every two-modifier-key combination with O is taken). From there, the shift-right-click, command prompt here is available.

Nick

January 23, 2015 23:17

+1 for leaving Alt+Space assigned to the System menu, like it has been for years and years, for every Windows application.

Am I the only one that regularly uses:

Alt+Space, x - Maximize window
Alt+Space, n - Minimize window
Alt+Space, r - "Restore" (Unmaximize) window
Alt+Space, m - Move window (For when the window somehow gets stuck offscreen and can't be reached with the mouse, and needs to be rescued using the keyboard.

Jon Schneider

January 24, 2015 11:57

If you use Console or ConsoleZ, I recommend to take a look at this extension https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/1460ab21-75be-49d0-900f-dfd538321424 from Grzegorz Kozub. Since I usually have several shells and prompts open at the same time in tabs this extension allows you to open them all at once or just a couple. You can create any keyboard shortcut you want for it too.

Juan Valenzuela

January 24, 2015 20:58

This is useful - a question though, is anybody aware of a way to access the Git command line in VS2015 for the current Project..? Perhaps I can add it as an external tool and pass parameters, but I was wonderful if there was an extension for this that is a neater solution. Any advice appreciated...

David McQuiggin

January 24, 2015 21:16

Ok, I should have looked closer... and found GitTools extension:

https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/48c3e91e-d1d7-4bf9-84dd-d3b97e2d5922?SRC=VSIDE

Seems to do the trick!

David McQuiggin

January 25, 2015 4:51

I know you are a fan of ConEmu and Clink so you might be interested in Cmder - http://bliker.github.io/cmder/

It's a nice re-packaging of ConEmu, Clink and MsysGit and it can be easily configured to be a Quake style console. It has themes and uses Monokai by default so it looks pretty(ish) from the start.

Nikhil Krishna

January 27, 2015 20:52

It is a good idea.
But, I can't use with Visual Studio Express 2013 to Web. I cried!

Leandro Souza

January 28, 2015 16:49

I use stexbar for windows explorer. It has a button to open a console in the directory you are in, cmd or powershell.

Also you can install it using Chocolatey cinst stexbar or choco install stexbar

Adam Wright

January 29, 2015 9:48

Alt+Space is used by Launchy

Dmitriy

January 30, 2015 8:31

Sweet... Funny blogged about adding that as an external command with a hotkey last week or so: http://weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2015/Jan/09/Tip-Create-a-Visual-Studio-Menu-option-to-Open-a-Command-Window which is similar except it gives you a little more control over what to shell to (Console2 for me specifically).

But you know what would be even better - is have Console support in a window like WebStorm does. While it seems like a little thing, having the command window right within the IDE and maybe active in a side panel is really nice instead of hunting around on the desktop through 20 windows to find the CLI...

Rick Strahl

January 31, 2015 20:24

I concur with previous comments about the functionality loss incurred by conflicting with the 25-year-old Alt+Space keyboard shortcut. I put an issue in GitHub that describes the concern.

Edward Brey

February 01, 2015 15:33

If you want to open the Git Shell installed by GitHub for Windows, set up the options as follows:

Command: powershell.exe

Command Arguments (single line):

-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -NoExit -Command .(Resolve-Path "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\GitHub\shell.ps1"); .(Resolve-Path "$env:github_posh_git\profile.example.ps1")

Dan Malcolm

February 02, 2015 20:31

Also, in windows explorer you could use autohotkey script for this. Explanation here.

Georgy

February 07, 2015 0:06

Be even more awesome if it opened it in a nice GUI style and it slid in and out of the top.. Instead of launching a new one every time ... And such :)

eric blade

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