Command Line Magic

Submitted on Jul 13, 2008, 12:16 p.m.

Well - I admit it - apart from some installation batch files I wrote when I was a junior helpdesk guy a long time ago - I'm a bit of a late bloomer to the command line.

I've got some time off over the summer before heading back to school  in October - and so I've been working through a backlog of to-do items and small projects; the most important of which was finally getting up-to-speed with automated builds, testing and deployment using NAnt , MSBuild  and the very cool WiX  - which of course leads to the command line and editing build and batch files.

I know Notepad2  and Notepad++  are popular replacements for notepad in the hacking community - but I've become rather attached to EditPadPro  - so that will do for now. I've renamed the .exe to ep.exe - and added the path to EditPadPro to my system wide path environment setting.

I also love this post from Scott  - Prompt(s) along with PushD and PopD  and the very cool prompt tip...

$P$_$+$G Which, when I set it via either the prompt command or the PROMPT environment variable, gives me a command line that looks like this:
C:\data\Projects\flexwiki\FlexWikiCore
++>

TAB AutoCompletion  is hot too - and I honestly didn't know it was there. :-(

Last on my list of productivity improvements is a replacement for Windows Vista Explorer - and I'll be trying both Total Commander  and [xplorer²]  - because Windows Vista Explorer is driving me nuts.

Back to the command line and build scripts... :-)