Cmder, enhance your Windows Terminal Console experience

One of the best new tools I have been using lately is Cmder. A Terminal Emulator for Windows which is great for a number of reasons:

• Tabbed terminals 
• Multiple languages can be emulated
• Fully customisable
• and best of all Quake mode

If you haven't seen it yet check it out http://cmder.net

I do a lot of work with PowerShell, Git and usually have many things on the go at once. What I really like about Cmder is that you can enable Quake mode which hides the terminal window at the top of your monitor screen and allows a keyboard short cut (Ctrl+`) to show/hide it. Making it very quick to open it over the top of other applications your working in (e.g. VS Code) and run commands. For example, when I am working on development projects I usually have VS Code open to edit the source code files and then I will have a PowerShell or Bash terminal emulated in Cmder for all my Git commands on the repo. Of cause you could just use the Git feature of VS Code in this case, but I usually always find there is some conflict I have to resolve at the Git console so just prefer to work in that. Plenty of other reasons I use Cmder too.

To get you started here is my quick setup steps which will set it up at least with Quake mode and your favorite terminal as default.

1. Download and install Cmder from http://cmder.net
2. Open Cmder.exe from the location you extracted it to.
3. Click on the 3 bar menu item in the bottom right
   
   
4. Select Settings
   
   
5. I have a Surface Book as my laptop which comes with a very large resolution (3000x2000) so I found I needed to change the "Size & Pos" settings, but obviously this is personal preference.
   
   
6. Click the Main > Quake style option in the setting menu. Ensure "Quake style slide down" is enabled and any other options as you require.
   
   
7. Select the Startup option from the settings menu and select the desired default task in the "Specified named task" drop down.
   
   
   
   This will give you the option of setting one of the default tasks as your default startup terminal. Such as Cmd.exe, PowerShell, Bash, etc. If you require anything more specific then use the Tasks section to define your own custom task. This is handy too for extending the functionality of Cmder, like setting up a SQLCMD terminal or specific PowerShell terminals for different technologies (e.g. Azure, SQL, Exchange, etc).
8. If you want to have Cmder start at logon, something I have found increasingly important as I grew to depend on Cmder for my terminal use. Select the Integration > Default term option in the settings menu. Then check the "Register on OS Startup" option. NOTE: For this setting to work you also need to set the "Force ConEmu as default terminal for console applications", and you will be prompted to do so if you don't check it first. This setting will have no effect without that setting also enabled.
   
   
9. Once you have configured the required setttings, such as Task Bar minimisation and other desired behaviors, click Save Settings.
10. Now return to your other applications, when you need a terminal press Ctrl+` (that is Ctrl plus tilt character) and the cmder terminal will load.

For documentation of any of the setting see: https://conemu.github.io/en/TableOfContents.html#settings

Some handy keyboard shortcuts, for the full list see http://cmder.net

Ctrl+` : Show/Hide the cmder terminal

Ctrl+Numer : Switch to that active terminal tab

Shift+Alt+Number : Fast new tab (e,g, Shift+Alt+1 for Cmd.exe or Shift+Alt+2 for powershell)

For the official documentation see https://conemu.github.io/en/TableOfContents.html

Happy terminal emulating

Legal Stuff: The contents of this blog is provided “as-is”. The information, opinions and views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily state or reflect those of any other company with affiliation to the products discussed. This includes any URLs or Tools. The author does not accept any responsibility from the use of the information or tools mentioned within this blog, and recommends adequate evaluation against your own requirements to measure suitability.

Fixing Merge conflicts in VS Code projects and VSTS (Visual Studio Online) repos

I use a combination of GitHub and Visual Studio Team Services (Visual Studio Online, VSTS, etc) repositories. GitHub is pretty straight forward for resolving merge conflicts of pull requests through it's online portal. Typically when I have come across merge conflicts in my VSTS repositories it has been with Visual Studio projects and so I could resolve them with the VS GUI. However I recently experienced a merge conflict with a pull request for one of my VSTS repositories where the code was written in Visual Studio Code. For working with the VSTS GIT repo I use the posh-git which comes with the GitHub Desktop install, but the logic here should transfer.

The situation I faced was that I had been working in a branch and editing a file, which had also been edited by a colleague in the master branch (I know, I know...). So when I pushed my changes from my local repo to VSTS and then used the web portal to create a Pull Request to merge the changes back into the master branch I received an error that there was a merge conflict blocking the pull request.

As I mentioned normally in this situation I am use to there being options provided to select which file/change you want to be kept. In VSTS i was not able to find any such option, and all articles online seemed to indicate how to fix this in Visual Studio GUI. While I do have VS installed I didn't want to use that as I am trying to just move to using VS Code and GIT command line where possible. I never did think to try the git menus in VS Code, or the GIT GUI..... and to be honest there is probably a better way to resolve this but this is how I resolved the conflict.

First I abandoned the Pull Request using the button in the screen shot above.

Next I ran git status to make sure that the "working tree is clean"

Then by looking at the history of the file in the VSTS portal within my branch, I tracked down the original commit id that the file was initialised with. Taking that identifier I ran git reset InitialCommitId PathToFile (e.g. git reset e99a################################c60 XML\9.xml

Now when you run git status it should so the file is unstaged. It will also show that there are changes for the same file to be committed. We need to discard the changes in the working directory (resetting it to the initial version the branch was created from). So run git checkout -- XML\9.xml

Now git status should show a change to be committed. Commit the change with git commit -m "description"

Your working directory should now show it is ahead of the origin branch, so push the changes upstream with git push.

Now your branch in VSTS does not contain any conflicts. I wasn't able to reactivate the existing pull request and have it succeed (it still showed the conflict), so I created a new fresh pull request for the branch and it was no longer blocked by a merge conflict.

Hopefully this helps others. If you have other suggestions on working around this please comment below.

Legal Stuff: The contents of this blog is provided “as-is”. The information, opinions and views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily state or reflect those of any other company with affiliation to the products discussed. This includes any URLs or Tools. The author does not accept any responsibility from the use of the information or tools mentioned within this blog, and recommends adequate evaluation against your own requirements to measure suitability.