Basic Tips on How to Make Windows Command Prompt More Friendly
Windows Command Prompt is an excellent development in Microsoft Windows which is worthwhile using to do something that 2000/XP/2003/Vista versions serve as a “Emulator” MS-DOS. When you access your system remotely, it becomes easy to manage a number of things via the command line, which is most useful in Windows dedicated server.
In this article we are going to see various commands and comments which I have gathered through my experience with Windows. Surely, you may know several commands on Windows, however many people may not know all of them.
The commands that we are going to see here are based on Windows XP the most commonly used today. Also, we are going to see how to make windows command prompt more friendly.
Basic Tips on Making Windows Command Prompt Friendly
When you open a session of it (Start >> Run >> cmd), by right-clicking the title bar, you can easily set default options for it. Selecting the “Properties” Menu will pop-up the title bar to set options which will be valid for all Windows prompt.
In the tab “Options” you may choose your cursor size, number of items in the command history and editing modes, including mode off “Insert” which by default eats the letters when you type on others.
In tab “Source”, it does not needfully define the source (it supports few, the”raster fonts”), simply the number of rows and columns of the window.
You can click the tab “Layout” and choose the default position of the window (ie. fixed distance from left and top of your screen) and the tab “Colors” to change the colors of black background.
Following are few shortcuts and commands that can be used:
- Press [ALT] Left + [ENTER]: It is used to switch between full screen and window. Also applies to programs that open full screen in the simulation environment from MS-DOS, such as many games and control programs. In this case, usually the window will be minimized, showing the desktop, and the program paused. When the windows is minimized, the simulation program in MS-DOS is not being processed, for example, a game of any other program that is minimized will be paused until the window is active.
- File names with spaces: Never forget to enter them in quotes. The spaces are the separators of parameters to pass file names without quotation marks to point to the computer means that the shares after the new space are parameters, and not a continuation of the file name you enter.
- In order to copy text in command prompt, you need to right-click in the window and select “Mark”. Once you select the “Mark” option, drag the mouse normally, but do take care that it selects a block of characters and not in line as usually you do in a text editor. Being with selected text, simply right-click the window again or you may press ENTER button on your keyboard. The selection will get cleared the text will be copied. Now in order to paste the text, you need to right-click and select the “Paste” option.
- It’s a very silly tip, but worth comment. If you wish to copy everything, you may right-click and choose “Select All” option. If you want to clear out the window, simply enter “cls” command to clear the past performance on the screen.
- Without using a mouse the Options can also be accessed through the Control menu. Just press [ALT] Left + [SPACE] and use the arrow keys on your keyboard to access the options or copy text. It is very useful when running Windows in order insurance if you have a serial mouse, since it does not load the device in safe mode.
- To view the information about a particular command, simply enter the command: help [commandname]. Remove the brackets before entering the commands. Another way to retrieve the info about a command is to enter the command: “commandname/?”. It applies to most of the programs but not all of them.
- If a particular command is about to complete, you can force it to stop by typing [CTRL] + [C] in the command prompt. Be cautious while using this command, as it may compromise the system or user data.


