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

Configuring Windows Terminal

The settings for Windows Terminal are all stored in a JSON file tucked away in your Windows profile. To access the settings, you can click on the down arrow to select a profile to launch and then choose Settings or you can use the Ctrl + , keyboard shortcut. Windows Terminal will open settings.json in the default editor for JSON files for your system.

The settings file is broken down into a few sections:

  • Global settings that are at the root of the JSON file
  • Per-profile settings that define and configure each profile independently
  • Schemes that specify color schemes that profiles can use
  • Key bindings that let you customize the keyboard shortcuts for performing tasks in Windows Terminal

There are a lot of options that can be tweaked in the settings for Windows Terminal and as it is continually being updated, new options appear over time! A full description of all of the settings is left to the documentation (https://docs.microsoft...