This is the list of all contributions published in this section, in chronological order.

If you don't like background images but can't survive without alpha blending, this article is not for you.

Following a discussion about 64-bit build on the Console's forum and a friendly reminder from Marko about still-broken Console on x64 platforms, I've finally got anxious enough to get a new build out

Differences from the official Build 142 include:

• 64-bit build
  Note: there is no real danger of downloading this version and trying it in your version of Windows XP or Windows Vista, but if you don't have a version that ends with "x64" you will get an error message "Console is not valid Win32 application", which is true by the way
• alpha blending is always disabled
  The whole point of this build is to ask people with real x64 versions to assess what's better: no images or no alpha blending.
• Additional processing of environment variables as described in Bug 2093153
• All the changes of 138.3, в том числе русская локализация.

So, if you feel adventurous, please, give my first (at least, in public) x64 application: Console 2.0.142.0 a shot.

Special thanks to Marko for continuing improvements to the great project, to Ronald "Ron" Blaschke for the first x64 build and Tomas Restrepo for saving me trouble to document another workaround for 64-bit alpha blending troubles.

Updated March 8th, 2009

Following the great success of my x64 build and immense popular demand (both of which are totally in my imagination), please, welcome Unofficial Console 2.0.142 for 32-bit systems by yours truly.

Features are the same as in the x64 build, except that Alpha Blending is enabled on 32-bit colors displays (which qualifies this version even for aesthetes, ClearType-lovers and Consolas font users, e.g. yours truly :)

Версия включает поддержку локализации новых настроек из официального релиза (а именно "Stop scrolling"). Как обычно, Ваши комментарии и предложения на OS zone будут приняты с благодарностью.

And your comments in English are more than welcome on SourceForge forum. For other localizations, please, take a look at [ 2542522 ] Other languages in the project's feature requests.

Well... unless you use Console, I can't help you. But if you do, you may need to upgrade to the latest build. But before you do that, you may want to add this article to your Web Slices. Please, welcome:

For those, who would like to use different colors in different tabs, as a M&M commercial says: "Your final wish has been granted". Now if you want to change colors in all your tabs, you would go to Edit > Settings > Console and change the map. But if you want to use a different tint of red for your Git tab, you can: in Edit > Settings > Tabs, select the tab you want to change and go to the Colors tab (that's a lot of tabs for one sentence). The story started when I read Scott Hanselman's blog post about the Console. I value Scott's opinion a lot, and that post meant a lot to me. There was also a discussion about word selection, which is available since the official 148. And then somebody mentioned Zenburn color scheme for Console available from Brian Reiter. I gave that scheme a try and generally liked it, but somehow it seemed a bit too dark for my Git tab. So, it was time to help myself and others.

Here is a list of 148.2 builds:

• for 32-bit Windows (1.62MB)
• for 64-bit Windows (1.84MB)
• Drop me a line on Console forum if you care about the installer.

Updated on September 27th, 2011
The new, unofficial build 147.6 is now available.
What's new:

• Double-click selects a word
• "Forgiving" click to copy
• Easy unselect
• Help updates by Vivian De Smedt

Have you been waiting for cmd-style selection for awhile? If your wait was not about rectangular selection, I think you'll love the new build. With some settings tweaking, you can make it work almost like in cmd.exe: double-left-click (Hotkeys > Mouse > Select text assigned to Left) to select a word, left click anywhere if the wrong word was selected, left-drag to select some other text, right click (Hotkeys > Mouse > Copy/clear selection assigned to Right) *anywhere* (Behavrior > Position-sensitive copy unchecked) to copy, right click one more time to paste (Hotkeys > Mouse > Paste text assigned to Right). Note: double-click will select a word as if the visible part was the whole thing. In other words, if your "word" extends past the visible portion of Console, the invisible portion will not be selected. You can download custom console.xml that is configured to mimic cmd.

Here is a list of 147.6 builds (zip files are a bit bigger this time because they include updated help file):

• for 32-bit Windows (1.58MB)
• for 64-bit Windows (1.79MB)
• Installer (2.92MB)

Updated on April 23rd, 2011
The new, unofficial build 147.4 is now available.
What's new:

• Unblocking help file when Console was installed by extracting from an archive. Thanks to Elias for making me read the doc :)
• -safe command line switch to make sure that Console starts
• The full command line support when reusing the previous instance
• The installer

Did you play with settings a bit too much and now the Console does not start even without any arguments? Did you like alpha-transparency so much that you set it at 255 and now you can't see it? Finally, you can start console -safe and see fully opaque window with the default command processor (or cmd.exe if you don't have one). Now... go and change your settings!

As noted couple times in the forum, if one downloads the binary archive and extracts it, the Help will not show any content. The reason, as explained in the forum, is that downloaded archives are marked as "unsafe", and when they're extracted all files are marked as "unsafe", and the help viewer does not want to display anything from an unsafe CHM. The solution turned out to be simple.

In November 2010, the -reuse swith was added to support reusing the Console instance, but back then I was lazy and supported only -t arguments [because that's all I needed for Jump List support]. But people were unhappy, so, the 147.4 passes the whole command line to the previous instance. Obviously, -c "config.xml" and -safe args are ignored.

And I'd like to reassure those, curious about what happened to 147.3 build, that I do know how to count :) It's just the -safe switch was not safe enough.

Here is a list of 147.4 builds:

• for 32-bit Windows (1.43MB)
• for 64-bit Windows (1.65MB)
• Installer (2.85MB)

Updated on November 20, 2010
The new, unofficial build 147.2 is now available.
What's new:

• Almost all goodies of the official build 147.
• Limited support for single-instance
• Support for Jump List in Windows 7 (highly experimental)
• Complete sources are available on GitHub

"Almost" is because I haven't included the required files to support running Win32 shells on x64 platforms because it's way too unstable.
Single-instance is activated by -reuse switch. Only one reusable instance is supported. The second instance, launched with -reuse, will honor only -t "TabName" switches.

Here is a list of 147.2 builds:

• for 32-bit Windows (1.43MB)
• for 64-bit Windows (1.64MB)

Updated on February 12, 2010
The new, unofficial build 146.1 is now available, thanks to Phillip Foose for multiple patches, GrayNM for an inspiring patch, and SRobertJames for his push for the newer build.
What's new:

• Bug Fix for 2250711 by Phillip Foose
• Bug Fix for 1959580 by Phillip Foose
• Feature 2002160 (aka Bug 2924201) is implemented
• Minor fixes in enhanced drag-and-drop
• Complete sources are available on GitHub

Here is a list of 146.1 builds:

• for 32-bit Windows (1.41MB)
• for 64-bit Windows (1.62MB)

Updated on January 23, 2010
Thanks to Jason, the link to the x64 build is now fixed.
Source news: the sources for my builds are slowly appearing on GitHub

While this web slice is new [to me], updates may come every 2880 minutes (i.e. every other day).

Updated on December 12, 2009
Includes:

• Everything from the official 2.0.0.145 version
• better fix for Win7 lockup
• Russian localization changes from koros aka ya158. Спасибо, ya158, за исправления! Действительно, многие термины выглядят теперь лучше.
• 64-bit version is now included in the package

Here is a list of available builds:

• Console 2.0.145: combined x86 and x64 package (2.75MB)
• for 32-bit Windows (1.27MB)
• for 64-bit Windows (1.48MB)

Note: don't forget to copy console.xml from the official distribution. And if you download the full package, don't forget to copy it to both folders - one copy next to console.exe and one copy next to x64\console.exe

Small note about the "better fix". The official version, in my humble opinion, does not fix all possible hangs. But the unofficial build should never hang on Windows 7.

И немного о русской версии. Я внимательно посмотрел все исправления, предложенные ya158 еще в июле 2009. Но, по-моему, некоторые из них выглядят хуже, чем наши с Виталием. Поэтому, в моей версии использовано "лучшее из лучшего". Отдельное спасибо, ya158, за Подчеркивания в диалоге настроек! Кроме этого, некоторые очепятки были исправлены по ходу дела.

Somebody, extremely curious and suspicious, may ask "Why have you formatted this article as a web slice? Who needs all those troubles? Are you going to take over my browser?" And the answer is unbelievably unprofessional: for no reason; I do; no, I don't. But it's so easy. And Nancy Strickland described them so nicely in a web course that I thought "why not?"

Another reason is that I'd like to make this article a permanent source of new versions of Console. And now "you can keep up with frequently updated sites directly from the new Favorites Bar", of course, if you have Internet Explorer 8. It's not that I'm going to re-build Console frequently - there are other things in life, not necessarily better, but definitely time-consuming - but, at least, you can easily see when that happened.

Another anticipated question is "What's the purpose of the combined package? And how do you detect whether I'm running on 64-bit Windows?" The first question is simple: the purpose is to "mitigate" the fact that Console cannot see certain files. Of course, as explained in that forum thread, 32-bit Console can't see certain 64-bit files by design, and I'm not going to fight that. But how many people can actually say which version of Windows they're running? Unless you read this article this far, you probably can't. Oh! Wait! You did read it this far, so you may consider the reasoning flowed. But what if you want to put Console on a USB or U3 drive (not that the combined package is U3-compatible)? You'll need to have two different versions and manually choose which one to load. Instead you can just grab the combined package and let Console decide which version will run on the system du jour better.

The second question is plainly interesting. I'm not going to pretend that America was discovered by yours truly. Instead you can read two great articles:

• How to detect programmatically whether you are running on 64-bit Windows by one of my favourite bloggers Raymond Chen
• 32/64-bit detection by the author of the great RichCopy utility
• and RTFMSDN about IsWow64Process