Cmder vs Contour

Cmder is a free, portable console emulator package for Windows. It uses ConEmu with Clink enhancements, a Monokai color scheme, and a custom prompt layout. Tabs can run cmd.exe, PowerShell, Bash, and Mintty shells. The package supports split panes, a scripting API, and SSH. Settings, aliases, and history can travel with Cmder on a USB stick or in the cloud. The Full edition includes Git for Windows and its Unix commands in PATH; Mini excludes vendored Git binaries. Aliases are configured with the alias command and stored in config/aliases, while executable files placed in bin are added to PATH. Registering with /REGISTER ALL adds a “Cmder Here” option to File Explorer. The documentation describes starting the vendored SSH agent with start-ssh-agent. Mini is a roughly 7.8MB download; Full is about 100MB or 52MB as a 7z archive. The project is licensed under MIT.

Contour is a free terminal emulator for everyday use, designed for people who want control over terminal workflows. It runs on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows. GPU-accelerated rendering and high-DPI support accompany text features such as font ligatures, Unicode grapheme clusters, and colored emoji. Users can split panes, use vi-like modes for navigation and selection, and jump through history with vertical markers. Sessions can persist beyond a terminal window and be reattached locally or over a network. Contour interoperates with tmux control mode in both directions, but not its -CC mode. It also supports clickable links, inline Sixel images, OSC 52 clipboard setting, and profiles for color schemes and login shells. TCP connections use TLS encryption and require a token. Daemon mode is experimental, and its command-line flags and wire protocol may change. The project website remains in draft mode. Contour is licensed under Apache License 2.0.