I try to travel to entrepreneurial hotspots as often as I can to keep my motivation and skill set high. The run is usually between the east coast (usually nyc) and Silicon Valley. This year, as business tends to be slow in January anyway and I have no real interest in winter, I headed off to Mountain View, CA for several weeks to immerse myself in meetups and demos. I love places like Mountain View. Normally when you go to a bar and sit down on a stool, the lateral chatter you unintentionally field has to do with sports, alimony or the mundanities of whatever job the chatterer is tired of. When you sit down at a Mountain View bar, even a rowdy one like Molly McGees on Castro, all the conversations around you things like “…it sounds really interesting, but how is he going to monetize…” or “…they got seeded by YC and they’re working on closing their second round with Sequoia…”.
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As the geek of our shop, I spend alot of my time in front of the command prompt. As i’ve recently been delving more and more into the worlds of ruby AND python, i’ve been staring down the C: even more often than normal. It started to wear on me, I needed a change of scenery… what’s a geek to do?

Mess with registry, OBVIOUSLY. Just changing around the Defaults menu (by right clicking the title bar of an open prompt session) was entirely too easy.

This is just a quick little fix I stumbled over that takes a tiny bite out of the dullness of promptland. First, open your registry editor by clicking: Start>Run>Regedit then browse your way through the registry tree: HKEY_CURRENT_USER>Software>Microsoft>Command Processor

There should be a couple entries in here, of interest to me were -

* CompletionChar – Character that turns autocomplete on. This is really useful for saving keystrokes while cruising through directories. I have it set to tab, cause why not?
* DefaultColor – Sets the color of the prompt text. It’s not RGB though, it’s a DOS control code color. Exciting. I’m not sure of all the options, so you’ll have to mess around a little yourself. My two favorites are 0000000e (orangy) and 0000000a (old school DOS green).

“Great!”, you say, “… but what about this horrible font?”. Yeah, for some reason Microsoft decided to limit font options for the prompt. It’s just not fair. Or is it? Yeah, there’s a registry key for that to. This time browse the registry editor to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SOFTWARE>Microsoft>Windows NT>CurrentVersion>Console>TrueTypeFont

In this key there should be an entry 0 with a value of “Lucide Console”. You can add more fonts to this list by adding an additional entry to the key, with an extra 0 and the value of the font you want to use. EXAMPLE – 00=verdana (thanks to Brian Duff for pointing this one out to me)

Another route alot of people seem happy with is to replace the conventional command prompt with cygwin, a kind of linux API emulator (for lack of a better term). If you’re interested in checking it out, head here.

Here are some other useful links relating to your friend, the command prompt:

Microsoft: Set the Command Processor Appearance in Windows XP
Command Prompt FAQ

Either way, if a few minutes messing around can make those long hours of cluttery prompt time more pleasant to your eyes, hook it up.