I find working on the command line in Windows frustrating, primarily because the console window is wretched to use compared to terminal applications on linux and OS X such as "rxvt", "xterm", or "Terminal". Major complaints:
No standard copy/paste. You have to turn on "mark" mode and it's only available from a multi-level popup triggered by the (small) left hand corner button. Then copy and paste need to be invoked from the same menu
You can't arbitrarily resize the window by dragging, you need to set a preference (back to the multi-level popup) each time you want to resize a window
You can only make the window so big before horizontal scroll bars enter the picture. Horizontal scroll bars suck.
With the cmd.exe shell, you can't navigate to folders with \\netpath notation (UNC?), you need to map a network drive. This sucks when working on multiple machines that are going to have different drives mapped
Are there any tricks or applications, (paid or otherwise), that address these issue?
Sorry for the self-promotion, I'm the author of another Console Emulator, not mentioned here.
ConEmu is opensource console emulator with tabs, which represents multiple consoles and simple GUI applications as one customizable GUI window.
Initially, the program was designed to work with Far Manager (my favorite shell replacement - file and archive management, command history and completion, powerful editor). But ConEmu can be used with any other console application or simple GUI tools (like PuTTY for example). ConEmu is a live project, open to suggestions.
A brief excerpt from the long list of options:
Far Manager users will acquire shell style drag-n-drop, thumbnails and tiles in panles, tabs for editors and viewers, true colors and font styles (italic/bold/underline).
PS. Far Manager supports UNC paths (\\server\share\...)