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

Using Windows Terminal

When you run Windows Terminal, it will launch your default profile. Profiles are a way of specifying what shell should be run in an instance of the terminal, for example, PowerShell or Bash. Click on the + in the title bar to create a new tab with another instance of your default profile, or you can click the down arrow to choose which profile you want to run, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 3.5 – A screenshot showing the profile dropdown for creating a new tab

The previous figure shows a range of options for launching a new terminal tab, and each of these options is referred to as a profile. The profiles shown were automatically generated by Windows Terminal – it detected what was installed on my machine and created the list of dynamic profiles. Better still, if I install a new WSL distro after Windows Terminal is installed, it will be automatically added to your list of available profiles! We'll take a quick...