Whenever delivering some Oracle training or running a demo at a conference, I’ve always liked to use the Windows command prompt version of sqlplus.
One reason of course is its easy command line history navigation capability ( press F7 in cmd.exe after entering few commands to see why ).
Another reason is that whenever I want to highlight some part of sqlplus output, I can just drag a selection rectangle around that text. In other words I can “mark” the text – drawing the attention there. Of course as the selection rectangle is really meant for copy & paste operations only, it has several limitations. It’s not persistent, whenever I continue typing, the text “marking” will disappear.
Windows XP has introduced a really cool feature to cmd.exe, which anyone doing presentations involving some command line tool output will appreciate!
Basically XP allows you to persistently select and color command prompt output!
An example of what I’m talking about is here:
