Published Apr 26, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT
Tashreef's fascination with consumer technology began in the school library when he stumbled upon a tech magazine, CHIP, which ultimately inspired him to pursue a degree in Computer Science. Since 2012, Tashreef has professionally authored over a thousand how-to articles, contributing to Windows Report and How-To Geek. He currently focuses on Microsoft Windows content at MakeUseOf, which he has been using since 2007.
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Windows Terminal has quietly become one of the better things Microsoft ships. Tabs, split panes, a proper Quake mode, GPU rendering, very usable Unicode support, and a Settings UI that does not make me edit JSON unless I want to. It is the terminal I default to, and I have not had a reason to look elsewhere in a long while.
Before Windows Terminal was this good, though, I was using Cmder. It was the bundle that made working in a Windows shell tolerable. It was portable, packaged with Git for Windows, and offered a lot more sane defaults out of the box. I assumed I would drop it the moment Microsoft's own terminal caught up with proper profiles and shell integration, and for the most part, I have. But Cmder never fully left my setup, because there are still a few things the old-school bundle does better than anything Microsoft ships on its own.
Git, ls, grep, and ssh are ready to go on any Windows machine
Windows Terminal is just a terminal host. It renders whatever shell you point it at, but it does not bring tools along with it. On a clean Windows install, cmd and PowerShell still do not ship with the Unix commands that I use every day. It doesn't have ls, grep, cat or ssh. If I want any of that, I have to install Git for Windows separately, deal with the PATH, and repeat the dance on every new machine.
Cmder doesn't have this issue. The full edition is about 100MB and ships with a vendored Git for Windows installation, which means I get git, ls, grep, cat, ssh, and a working bash shell without needing to install anything on top of it. All the commands I would use on a Linux box just work right out of the Zip archive.
It also bolts Clink onto cmd, which gives bash-style command line editing. That means reverse history search with Ctrl+R, better tab completion, and the kind of shortcuts that feel natural if you have spent any time in a Linux shell. Plain cmd inside Windows Terminal does not do any of this without adding Clink yourself.
The practical upshot is that pointing a Windows Terminal profile at Cmder's init.bat gives me the best of both worlds. I get Windows Terminal's GPU rendering and tab handling, and Cmder's shell quietly populates the environment with every Unix tool I need.
Cmder is portable
The whole environment lives in one folder, you can copy anywhere
The portability is another reason why Cmder still has an edge over anything Windows has to offer. For instance, the Windows Terminal is a Store app tied to a Microsoft account and the OS itself; you cannot just copy it to another computer. Cmder is the opposite end of that spectrum.
It is a single folder. Once you unzip it to C:\tools\Cmder, set the %CMDER_ROOT% environment variable, and that is the entire setup. If I want to move it to another drive or another machine, I can simply copy the folder, and everything travels with it, including my aliases, my color scheme, my keyboard shortcuts, my bundled Git, and any binary I dropped in the bin folder to put on the PATH.
Windows Terminal does let you export settings, but that only covers Windows Terminal itself. It does not bring your Git binary, your Unix tools, or your aliases along for the ride. Cmder treats the whole shell environment as one portable unit, and nothing Microsoft ships quite matches that.
Cmder's alias file beats setting up a PowerShell profile
A plain text file for shortcuts, no scripting required
Portability would be half the appeal if I had to rebuild my shortcuts on every machine. This is where Cmder's alias file earns its keep, and it is the piece I have never found a clean replacement for in pure PowerShell.
Cmder stores aliases in a plain text file under its config folder, and the syntax is as simple as it gets. One line per alias, alias gs=git status $* or alias ..=cd .., and the shortcut is live the next time I open a shell. You don't have to worry about scripting, configuring the execution policy or hunting for the right profile path. If you have ever set up a PowerShell profile with useful commands you actually reuse, you know the contrast.
A PowerShell profile is a script file that runs at startup, and it lives at one of several paths under your Documents folder, depending on which host and which version of PowerShell you are using. Set-Alias only handles simple command-to-command mappings, so anything that needs arguments, like gs expanding to git status with flags, has to be written as a full function. That is fine if you enjoy writing PowerShell. It is a lot of ceremony if all you want is a two-letter shortcut for git status.
The portability point compounds here, too. My alias file is inside the Cmder folder, which means when I copy Cmder to a new machine, every shortcut I have ever defined comes with it. A PowerShell profile does not travel unless I explicitly sync the Documents path, and even then, it is only half the setup.
Cmder
OS Windows
Price model Free
Cmder is a free, portable console emulator for Windows. Built on ConEmu and Clink, it offers tabbed terminals, Unix commands, custom aliases, and a Monokai theme—all from a USB stick.
Why this old bundle still earns its place
I will be the first to admit Cmder's window is showing its age. The rendering is sluggish next to Windows Terminal's GPU-accelerated output, tab handling is basic, and the ConEmu UI underneath it looks like it was designed a decade ago. If you are still launching Cmder directly, I understand why you would want to move on.
The trick is to stop treating Cmder as a terminal and start treating it as a shell bundle inside Windows Terminal. Point a WT profile at Cmder's init script, and the old interface never loads. What you keep is the Unix tooling, the portable folder, and the alias file, wrapped in Microsoft's modern renderer. Cmder was built out of frustration with Windows console emulators, and Microsoft has finally fixed most of that frustration on the rendering side. The parts it has not fixed are exactly why the old bundle still earns its place.