When I was working with RedHat at Uni, one of the things I liked most about the command line was that it stored commands from previous sessions to its buffer for long-term retrieval. The ability to press up a couple of times and rerun a command set from yesterday was a big help in getting me to accept the notion of typing being better than clicking.
Of course, now I'm back to WinXP and its successors, it's a perpetual pain in the neck to retype the same command sets every time I open a new command prompt dialogue, especially the pathnames. Clearly I've been spoiled. but…
Is there any way to make the Windows Command Prompt store its buffer from one session to the next?
Edit: My office has pretty strict policies on downloading to work PCs, so while I'm interested in alternative programs for home use, I'd prefer a solution that isn't dependent something like cygwin or Powershell.
Best Answer
Cygwin is the best option here. It keeps command history just like your unix shell does on a genuine unix box. Something to be said about cygwin is that it supports all of the native shell commands that windows "knows and loves".
So do not think just because you are running it in a cygwin shell that you have any limited functionality. Cygwin appears to be running right on top of a command shell within windows.