WinOne Free Command Prompt for Windows 8.5

Overview

Windows’ Command Prompt is a bit dull and outdated indeed, and could certainly use some improvement. It’s not that system administrators or other kinds of users need a better CMD.exe, but it wouldn’t hurt if it were more user-friendly and had a few more features, would it? If you think about that as well, then you can try out WinOne- an alternative to CMD which has more capabilities that makes execution of command line arguments less difficult, more enjoyable and overall better. Keep on reading for more details.

Installation

The downloadable archive is about 7.5MB; once you download it, extract its contents to a folder and run setup.exe. The installation procedure will begin, and ask you for a directory in which the program will be installed. After clicking “Continue”, the main installation process will take place, and when it’s finished, a new item will be added in the Start menu from where you will be able to run WinOne.

The application is 100% clean from any kinds of malware (viruses, trojans, etc.) and doesn’t contain 3^rd-party advertised software either.

Supported operating systems are Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1 (32/64-bit).

Interface

WinOne’s interface is more modern than Windows’ command line interpreter, mostly due to the fact that it has a toolbar, a status bar, a drive bar and various text colors. The text background is black by default, but can be changed to another color (or even image) too- the same goes for pretty much any attribute in this program.

When WinOnce is open, several details are printed on its screen, such as program version and copyright, character encoding, run-as privileges, windows directory, display capability (number of colors), free system memory, plus a useful program tip (which is different every time you run the program).

Pros

WinOne has a vast variety of features that make it a great application that can effectively replace CMD. Moro precisely, its features include:

• Color adjustments to virtually any attribute of the program via the Attributes menu (it can be accessed by right-clicking on the program’s title bar and selecting “Attributes”). ANSI sequences are supported as well, for cursor and screen control.
• Both ANSI and Unicode character encodings are supported.
• Multiple commands can be entered in a single line.
• ZIP, LZH, ARJ and ARC support.
• Support for processing batch programs (.BAT, CMD or .WBT) either in the main WinOne window or a separate window.
• Support for command line macros (sequences of commands can be grouped together).
• The last 256 command lines are stored and can be displayed in a list via the HISTORY command.
• The customizable toolbar can have up to 27 buttons, all of which are user-defined and can have any kind of functionality.
• Copy/paste from the clipboard.
• The status bar displays time, free memory bytes and a percentage indicator for the completion of all currently executing commands.
• The drive bar displays a list with all available drives.
• Many additional commands are available.

Cons

There are no cons; the program has no bugs, a rich documentation and a quite user-friendly GUI.

Alternatives

CMD++ (free) is one of the better alternatives for the command prompt, which is very popular but doesn’t have as many features as WinOne.  Other alternatives are ConEmu (free), Console (free), cmder (free), clink (free) and PowerCmd (paid).

Conclusion

WinOne has tons of features for those who wish to have more control over the console window and be able to use it in a more convenient way.