If you’re a power user, by any definition of the word, then you probably have used the command prompt in Windows before. It’s also very likely that you’ve been frustrated by the inability to resize the window to anything wider than 24 characters. I’ve been using the windows command prompt for years and always just pegged it on Microsoft being ‘teh suck’, and assumed there wasn’t any other way to go about it. Today I discovered it doesn’t have to be this way.

Microsoft definitely should have made it easier to resize your command prompt window in both directions and I can imagine no reason why they wouldn’t have, but at least you can hardly blame yourself for not figuring it out on your own. The secret lies in the hidden preferences panel for the command prompt. Right click on the title bar and you can choose ‘Properties’ to temporarily change the display options on the command prompt you have open or ‘Defaults’ to change the options that all command prompt windows will start with.

defaults

Console Window Layout Properties

Switch over to the ‘Layout’ tab and increase the width in the ‘Window Size’ section. Unless you have a particularly large monitor you probably won’t be able to fit more than 150-200 characters on your screen. (This will be especially so if you’re like me and change the font to size 14 Lucida Console for nice big readability.) I also like to change the buffer height to something closer to 3000 so I can scroll back up farther. Click OK and all the command prompt windows you open from now on will be nice and wide!