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

Tips for working with Remote-WSL

This section will call out a number of tips that can help to further refine your experience when working with Visual Studio Code and Remote-WSL.

Loading Visual Studio Code from your terminal

In Windows, you can launch Visual Studio Code from a terminal using the code <path> command to open the specified path. For example, you can use code . to open the current folder (.) in Visual Studio Code. This actually uses a code.cmd script file, but Windows allows you to drop the extension.

When working with WSL, it is common to have a terminal open, and with Remote-WSL, you also get a code command. So, you can navigate to your project folder in the terminal in WSL and run code . and it will launch Visual Studio Code and open the specified folder (the current folder in this case) using the Remote-WSL extension. This integration is a nice option to have and maintains a sense of parity and integration between Windows and WSL environments.

Here...