Book Image

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

By : Stuart Leeks
Book Image

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

By: Stuart Leeks

Overview of this book

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) allows you to run native Linux tools alongside traditional Windows applications. Whether you’re developing applications across multiple operating systems or looking to add more tools to your Windows environment, WSL offers endless possibilities. You’ll start by understanding what WSL is and learn how to install and configure WSL along with different Linux distros. Next, you'll learn techniques that allow you to work across both Windows and Linux environments. You’ll discover how to install and customize the new Windows Terminal. We'll also show you how to work with code in WSL using Visual Studio Code (VS Code). In addition to this, you’ll explore how to work with containers with Docker and Kubernetes, and how to containerize a development environment using VS Code. While Microsoft has announced support for GPU and GUI applications in an upcoming release of WSL, at the time of writing these features are either not available or only in early preview releases. This book focuses on the stable, released features of WSL and giving you a solid understanding of the amazing techniques that you can use with WSL today. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to configure WSL and Windows Terminal to suit your preferences, and productively use Visual Studio Code for developing applications with WSL.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction, Installation, and Configuration
5
Section 2:Windows and Linux – A Winning Combination
11
Section 3: Developing with the Windows Subsystem for Linux

Introducing Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal is a replacement terminal experience for Windows. If you're used to running command-line applications on Windows, you are likely to be familiar with the previous Windows Console experience that you see when you run PowerShell or cmd.exe (shown in the following figure):

Figure 3.1 – A screenshot showing the cmd.exe user experience

Windows Console has a long history spanning back through the Windows NT and Windows 2000 era, and back to Windows 3.x and 95/98! During this period, many, many Windows users have created scripts and tools that depend on the behavior of the Windows Console. The Windows Console team managed to make some good improvements to the experience (for example, Ctrl + mouse wheel scrolling to zoom the text, and improved handling of ANSI/VT control sequences emitted by many Linux and UNIX command-line apps and shells) but were ultimately limited in what they could achieve without breaking...