Windows terminal with alpha transparency for the desktop pimp

Today I finally got around to picking up a wide screen LCD for my office, following a growing trend towards 16:9 ratio viewing area that’s happening all around us. With all this new space to fill I’ve gone on a bit of a mission to beautify my desktop with various shiny things that will astonish my fellow cubicalists and stupify the computer-illiterate (eg. lawyers *cof* odog *cof* couldn’t even open a browser *cof* ahem). For a good 15 minutes I was completely obsessed with making my terminals transparent so I could keep the fugly catalina tail on my 2nd monitor without it ruining my otherwise perfectly aesthetic desktop. I quickly discovered that of the various transparent-window-making-applications I could find, none could control the transparency of good old cmd.exe.

Enter the open-source terminal-enhancer Console2 that is nothing more than a facade over the default terminal, and nothing less than everything cmd.exe should be! Could it be that those Micro$oft buffoons don’t value the aesthetics of my desktop? I think an update to the boring old command line window is well overdue! A close-to-erupting Steve Balmer said it best: Developers, developers, developers…