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

Interoperability tips and tricks

In this section, we will look at some tips that you can use to boost your productivity when working between Windows and WSL. We will see how to use aliases to avoid specifying the extension when executing Windows commands to make them feel more natural. We'll also see how to copy text from Linux to the Windows clipboard and how to make Windows folders fit in more naturally in a WSL distro. After that, we'll see how to open files in the default Windows application from Linux. From there, we will look at how Windows applications are able to work with WSL paths when we pass them as parameters, as well as how to take control of mapping paths when the default behavior doesn't work. Finally, we'll look at how to share SSH keys from Windows into WSL distros for easy key maintenance.

Let's get started with aliases.

Creating aliases for Windows applications

As was noted earlier in the chapter, when calling Windows applications...