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

Working with multiple panes

In the previous section, we saw the use of tabs when working with multiple shells open at the same time, but sometimes it is desirable to be able to see more than one shell at a time. In this section, we will look at how to work with multiple panes in Windows Terminal to achieve things like this:

Figure 6.5 – A screenshot showing multiple panes in Windows Terminal

The preceding screenshot shows running multiple profiles in panes in the same tab: on the left is PowerShell window that has made a web request, the top-right pane is running a web server, and the bottom-right pane has htop running to track running Linux processes in WSL.

Tip

If you are familiar with the tmux utility (https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki), then this may look familiar, as tmux also allows splitting a window into multiple panels. But there are some differences. One feature of tmux is to allow you to disconnect and reconnect from terminal sessions...