This blog has been inspired by Rick Strahl’s article Tip: Create a Visual Studio Menu option to Open a Command Window. Rick details how to set up Visual Studio to allow you to open Console2 from a keyboard shortcut within Visual Studio.
This is great, but I prefer cmder myself. The setup is very similar to the instructions provided by Rick, the only real difference being the argument to start in the current directory.
To start, download cmder if you haven’t already. There is no installation required, just unzip the download to where you want it. Then open External Tools in Visual Studio.
Click ‘Add’ and fill in the details as per the screen shot below. The ‘Command’ value is the location of the cmder.exe in your unzipped folder.For the argument I have used the $(SolutionDir) value, but you could use $(ProjectDir) if you prefer. I use the solution directory as I’m usually running Git commands.
I would also highly recommend setting up cmder in the context menu:-
Open a terminal as an Administrator
Navigate to the directory you have placed Cmder
Execute .cmder.exe /REGISTER ALL If you get a message “Access Denied” ensure you are executing the command in an Administrator prompt.
In a file explorer window right click in or on a directory to see “Cmder Here” in the context menu.
Hope this is of use.
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