If you’ve got an Android phone and you know what ADB is and you are using a Windows machine primarily, chances are you’ve been annoyed by stuff like this in the past:

Those little arrows with numbers are called “ANSI Escape Sequences“, which under Linux (and whatever UNIX flavors) are pretty common and are used for a bunch of stuff, which you can read on the Wiki page I linked because I’m too lazy to do it for you, and for color output!

We all know cmd.exe is a bunch of steaming pile of shit if you ever tried to use a terminal on Windows for other stuff than pinging an IP address. Amongst cmd.exe’s technical limitations, I’m pissed off by:

So, in my searches I’ve stumbled upon Console which is a console window enhancement for Windows.

By itself fixes a number of things I really hated, but still has one issue – it’s still using cmd.exe “in the background” thus it doesn’t support ANSI properly.

Here’s where I found another “little helper”: ANSICON. From the author’s page: “ANSICON provides ANSI escape sequence recognition for Windows console programs (both 32- (x86) and 64-bit (x64)). It is basically the Windows equivalent of ANSI.SYS.”.

So, what I did to “marry” these 2 great “programs” in a perfect harmony under Windows (because I like to do WinKey + R -> console ) was to extract BOTH Console and ANSICON under the C:\Windows directory (because I’m lazy like that, and I don’t like to edit the PATH in Windows), then in Console I set up the default terminal to be ansicon.exe:

The result?

Oh, and before I forget, a free tip: to copy/select something, press Shift and drag the mouse cursor.