Wanna a functional and beautiful terminal emulator on Windows other than cmd or powershell? Let’s do it by combining Cmder and Hyper.

Hyper is an Electron-based terminal that can be used as an alternative to ConEmu as the terminal emulator. The main reason for me to use Hyper is its appearance, it looks pretty good than cmd.exe.

Cmder is a software package created as a nice console emulator on Windows. It has numerous features, including tabs, nice utilities like ls and grep, and so on.

Combining these two powerful tool together would be a great trial on Windows.

Here are the steps I followed:

1. Install the Windows package manager chocolatey by running the following command in cmd.exe (run as Administrator):

   @"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"
   

2. After that, install sudo with chocolatey, still in cmd.exe in administrator mode:

   choco install sudo
   

   By doing so, you can install packages (softwares) with Administrator permissions using sudo choco install xxx.

3. Install Cmder with chocolatey:

   sudo choco install Cmder
   

   This will also install the git-for-windows if it’s not been installed.

4. Install Hyper with chocolatey:

   sudo choco install hyper
   

5. Now, config Hyper environments.

   Open Hyper, and then open the Preferences config file (Ctrl + ,). Navigate in the .hyper.js configuration file, find and modify these variables accordingly:

   shell: 'cmd.exe',
   shellArgs: ['--login', '/k', 'C:\\tools\\cmder\\vendor\\init.bat'], // path to Cmder init.bat
   env: { 'TERM', 'cygwin' }, // required for git-for-windows
   

Yeah, that’s it. Re-launch Hyper, you should be greeted with Cmder started in Hyper…

It’s also safe to install Cmder and Hyper manually without chocolatey, just ignore step 1 & 2.

Then, happy coding~