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When comparing Kali Linux vs cmder, the Slant community recommends cmder for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Windows?” cmder is ranked 1st while Kali Linux is ranked 37th. The most important reason people chose cmder is:
Cmder builds on [ConEmu](https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5) console emulator, by adding enhancements from [clink](http://mridgers.github.io/clink/) (such as bash-style completion in cmd.exe and PowerTab in powershell.exe) and optionally extending it with [msysgit](http://msysgit.github.io), that brings Unix tools to Windows.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Better than ParrotOS, BackBox for hacking purpose
Contains too many tools for hacking. Those tools are not already included in BackBox or ParrotOS.
Pro Standard pentest tool set
Pro Live session distro used for forensics
Pro Minimal and portable version available
There is a portable version of cmder available which is just 10 MB in size. It can be put on an external device, like a USB stick, and run off it. There's no installation required.
Pro Has built-in Quake style drop-down mode
This is an extremely useful mode whereby the console hides and shows on ctrl+~ similar to a gaming console. This feature is inherited from ConEmu.
Pro Works nicely with command line applications
Such applications include CMD, Powershell, and MinTTY.
Pro File explorer integration
Cmder can be added to the right-click menu, allowing the user to start a terminal session from the selected directory with a "Cmder Here" command. The functionality can be enabled by opening up a terminal with administrator privileges, navigating to the Cmder folder and executing .\cmder.exe /REGISTER ALL.
Pro Monokai color scheme
Cmder pretties up the default look of ConEmu using Monokai color scheme out of the box and allows flexible color and transparency schemes, including custom out-of-focus opacity.
Pro Integrates with graphical applications
Portable GUI applications can be integrated directly into the interface of the terminal emulator.
For example, it's possible to integrate ST3 with cmder by moving the portable version of ST3 to /cmder/vendor/ and editing alias file in /cmder/config/aliases to include subl="%CMDER_ROOT%\vendor\Sublime Text 3\sublime_text.exe" $1 -new_console:s75V. Now writing subl in the command line will open ST3. The alias of subl can be changed to whatever's needed and similarly, the -new_console option's parameters can be changed to alter how the text editor integrates with the terminal emulator. It can be horizontal or vertical splits of varying sizes or tabs, etc.
Pro Works with WSL bash.exe
CMDer works great with the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Just change your startup task to point to the bash.exe file.
Pro Highly flexible
Integrates with:
- cygwin
- mintty
- powershell
- msysgit
Pro Works with ZSH and Oh My ZSH through WSL (using ubuntu 18.04)
Set ZSH as shell using "chsh" command, and launch the console using "ubuntu1804" command.
Pro Works with VS Code, Hyper and IDEs
Cmder can be used with popular editors such as VS Code, which delivers aliases and clink as well as its color scheme to VS Code.
It can also be used without ConEmu and Hyper as an alternative terminal emulator, which makes customizing the UI through NPM plugins much easier.
Cons
Con Not intended to be a daily driver
This distro was written for pen testing and security work. It is not meant to be a day-to-day OS (unless that's your job).
Con Very old packages
E.G. Firefox's current version is 61 but Kali linux consists of its 52th version. Though kernel is not that old.
Con Issues with non-unicode characters
'ls' command can have issues with non-unicode characters such as cyrillic. As of 1.1.2, 'dir' can be used as a substitute that will properly display non-unicode characters. Unfortunately, it's an issue with msysgit that isn't being officially addressed (a workaround is available) thus no official ETA on the bugfix is available.
Con Not as portable as advertised
Even though cmder is advertised as a "portable terminal emulator for Windows", it's not adequately minimalistic to be considered truly portable. In fact, one of the dependencies required to use it is the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015.
Con Issues with escape codes
Sometimes it doesn't interpret terminal escape codes correctly and the output gets mangled using tmux over ssh, for instance.
Con Slower than ConEmu
Con There is no ligatures support
As though the fonts like Fira Code or Hasklig work in Cmder, this enhancement for the Windows command prompt doesn't display ligatures in the above-mentioned fonts.
Con Lots of conflicts with OS keybindings
By default, things lke ctrl-w will close your window unexpectedly when using nano or trying to delete a word in bash.
Con The portable (mini) version does not have UNIX commands
UNIX command support is only available for the full version.
Con Very slow
Scrolling in vim lags the screen and can crash.
