The Console plugin provides you with two command-line shells, one for the System and one for Beanshell. It also provides an interface for other plugins to add arbitrary shells to the Console plugin.

Console will parse error messages from other programs and feed them to the ErrorList plugin.

In addition, Console provides buttons in a "commando toolbar" for your favorite command-line tools (make, ant, qmake, latex, etc), and an easy way to add others.

Console has special "compile" and "run" actions, which can be mapped to a single shortcut. The actions can perform a different commando action from each edit mode.