Question: Isn't that nicely recursive? 

I've got a portable command prompt on my external drive, and it has a nice .bat file to configure some initial settings, but I'd like more! 

Here's what I know how to set from .bat:

* Colors = (color XY) where x and y are hex digits for the predefined colors
* Prompt = (prompt $p$g) sets the prompt to "C:\etc\etc >" the default prompt
* Title = (title "text") sets the window title to "text"
* Screen Size = (mode con: cols=XX lines=YY) sets the columns and lines size of the window
* Path = (SET PATH=%~d0\bin;%PATH%) sets up local path to my tools and appends the computer's path

So that's all great. But there are a few settings I can't seem to set from the bat. Like, how would I set these up wihtout using the Properties dialogue:

* Buffer = not screen size, but the buffer
* Options like quick edit mode and autocomplete
* Popup colors
* Font. And can you use a font on the portable drive, or must it be installed to work?
* Command history options

Answer: 
You can set these values through a shortcut (.INK file).

I have a shortcut on my desktop with this as the target:

%windir%\system32\cmd.exe /K %userprofile%\STARTUP.CMD

The /K switch tells CMD.exe to run the batch file (which sets some variables, the prompt, etc.) and then stay open.

If you right-click on the shortcut and view its properties, you can set the window and buffer size, popup colors, starting position (x,y axis), etc. The settings will be saved in the shortcut itself and will be applied every time you open CMD.exe using that shortcut.
For true Buffer Size adjustment use DOSKEY /LISTSIZE=size

You can't change colors within the shell anymore since Microsoft took ANSI ESC control out of the command/cmd prompts.