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Actually, you just mean the console, not cmd.exe.

cmd.exe is just an command interpreter (like bash) that needs a console/terminal (like xterm) just as any other CLI application does.

In other words, is not cmd.exe that sucks, but the Windows console. If Microsoft improved the console, cmd would immediately become nicer to use (though still hobbled by an inane scripting language).

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No--cmd.exe is very tightly tied to the underlying command line infrastructure. This is a large part of why alternatives such as Console are so bad--they can only access the command interpreter and infrastructure as a stream, which rules our most character-mode applications. (Cygwin/rxvt get around this by not using the Windows infrastructure at all; curses can be built for Windows and works in cmd.exe, but character-mode code written for cmd.exe will break hard in rxvt.)

Sadly, for most definitions, cmd.exe is the console and the interpreter.

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