Hyper

Working with command-line tools is not exactly what most of us would call having a hoot. To top it all off, the Command Prompt is not exactly flexible or overly-powerful either, at least when compared to macOS's Terminal, for instance.

Meet Hyper, a modern, Electron-based terminal tool that allows you to run a wide variety of useful command-line tasks within a versatile and highly customizable environment.

Once you load Hyper for the first time, you are greeted by a typical Command Prompt interpreter window. The user-interface, while simplistic, looks a bit more chunky than what you would find in the default one. In the upper-left corner of the main window, you will find a small, hamburger-like menu. Click it, and you are instantly provided with a set of useful options.

For example, from the File menu, you can open new tabs and, even more interestingly, you can horizontally and vertically split the windows in half. As expected, you can do this as many times as you like, until you end up with as many instances of split-views as you need. In addition to its UI flexibility, you will be happy to hear that Hyper comes with support for all sorts of extensions and plugins. This, of course, means that you can upgrade the app's capabilities and even drastically change the way it looks.

Since it is built with Electron, it also means that it can be run on two of the most popular OSes out there, namely Windows as well as macOS, and, fear not, a version for Linux is currently in the works. This is also the reason why Hyper is not exactly "snappy," at least when compared to other similar, native tools.

Before the end, we would also like to point out that during our tests, for whatever unknown reason, Hyper failed to load the default plugins and extensions.

Taking everything into account, we will say that Hyper is a very interesting app, especially since it is designed using Electron web technologies. It offers a very flexible environment (both functionally and visually) for doing all sorts of command line wizardry.

Sure, it is not exactly speedy (at least in its current development stage), but for users who often find themselves with tons of active Command Prompt windows, it might just be the change they have been searching for.