ConEmu automation
Disclaimer Please note, that this document has been written for a long period, and some answers may be obsolete. If you find any Q/A, which differs from other parts of documentation or the actual program behavior, please let us know via ‘Suggest better edit’ link at the bottom of the page.
Q. How to distinguish different ConEmu instances (windows)?
A. If you need to have different appearance or behavior of the ConEmu installation, you may use switch -config “name” to use different named configurations. So you may store several configurations in one xml file. Alternatively you may specify certain xml file using switch -LoadCfgFile “path\to\file.xml”. Just create new shortcut on your Desktop or run ConEmu from script.
The following will start new ConEmu window using named config git maintenance
and start the tab running script C:\sources\maintain.cmd.
ConEmu64.exe -config "git maintenance" -nosingle -run "C:\sources\maintain.cmd"
A. If you need to popup different windows using different hotkeys you may create several shortcuts on the Desktop and choose hotkey for each.
For example, choose hotkey Ctrl-Alt-1 for the command:
ConEmu64.exe -nosingle -run {bash}
And hotkey Ctrl-Alt-2 for the command:
ConEmu64.exe -nosingle -run {cmd}
When you run ConEmu from these shortcuts you may activate windows using selected hotkeys
Ctrl-Alt-1 and Ctrl-Alt-2.
A. If you need to distinguish two ConEmu windows programmatically, from ahk, python or powershell scripts, or even from third-party tools, you have two possibilities:
1) Use -title “Window name” switch to explicitly set window title
of new ConEmu instance. The example below starts new ConEmu window with
title My server and ssh to your.server.com inside. Does not matter if you run
another tab, or several tabs from task, the ConEmu window title remains My server.
So you may rely on the title for selecting the window with class name VirtualConsoleClass.
ConEmu64.exe -nosingle -title "My server" -run ssh your.server.com
2) Windows 7 introduced AppUserModelID.
ConEmu uses executable path name and some switches (like -config, -loadcfgfile, -quake)
to create a hash to form AppID, which you may see in the About / SysInfo.
Current version shows 1d5372066082f23b41ba6aa278e56e9d::163. The trailing ::163 depicts ConEmu internal
protocol version which may (and most probably would) be changed in the future. The hash itself is expected
to be unchanged. You may query the ID from running ConEmu process using Windows API function
GetApplicationUserModelId.
