Cortana vs ConEmu

You can ask Cortana what music is playing and she will attempt to identify it.

Cortana monitors your Bing search history, social network actions, music played, etc to find out what are your favorite artists and will let you know if they plan to play in your area.

ConEmu allows running CMD, PowerShell, Cygwin, PuTTY, TCC/LE, etc.

You can configure a plethora of settings, including shortcuts and aesthetics (background image, transparency, colors, and fonts) per software.

ConEmu integrates well with Explorer.

Hotkeys allow the user to easily trigger an action and can be configured to their liking.

ConEmu allows the user to create tabs (Win+W by default) for separate instances of the terminal window, allowing them to have both multiple shells and multiple instances of the same shell open. The user can also set up a startup directory for each tab and run each tab as a specific user or rights.

If you have both ConEmu and DosBox installed, you can run DOS applications (and games) within a 64-bit OS environment.

ConEmu was originally designed as an updated front-end specifically for the FarManager, which means it has increased functionality.

ConEmu permits the user to check up on the progress of an operation with a quick glance at the taskbar, without needing to bring the app to the foreground.

Not only does the status bar show detailed information out-of-the-box, it can be configured for your specific needs.

ConEmu is licensed under New BSD which is a class of very simple and liberal software licenses.

You can change the width and height of the console window without having to reset your session.

With -new_console and -cur_console switches you can run simple GUI apps in a ConEmu tab (or split).

You can set up ConEmu as a transparent, Quake-style console by following these instructions.

To put ConEmu in borderless mode:

Set Main -> Appearance -> Frame Width to 0

ConEmu allows pinning commands to Jump Lists (available in Windows 7 & 8; accessed by right-clicking the application in the taskbar), giving you quick access to common tasks and configurations.

ConEmu supports searching in all text that has been printed or entered in the console history.

ConEmu is under active development. Updates roll out almost daily with bugfixes and new features.

ConEmu offers multiple, configurable ways of interacting with text, including an ability to select text in a rectangular way.

The screenshot tool allows the user to capture their computer desktop or anything shown on their computer screen in a static image file.

Zero config gets you all your installed shells.

Supports many of the features that iTerm users have become accustom to (like multiple tabs, highlighting, configurable scroll bars, decent support for themed color pallets to support basic/solarized/etc.).

There were issues before that forced me to use graphical versions of Vim/Neovim, but latest versions of Conemu + Neovim, seem to be working much better on Windows now.

There were issues before in the WSL usage scenario that forced me to use an X gui terminal using X forwarding, but now Conemu is working great, and is the only terminal I use from Windows/WSL.