Wsl Dev On Windows 2024

October 25, 2024

I recently got a new Windows PC and decided to set it up for programming work. I prefer the developer experience on Linux/Mac (the former more than the latter), but really don’t like switching computers or maintaining multiple boots.

I’ve used WSL in the past, and it’s a perfect compromise.

I periodically redo my setup from scratch. I do it to give all the tools I use a refresher. It’s a natural way of exploring what new tools are out there and weighing them against what I currently use. This article will cover the October 2024 edition of that venture.

WSL #

This was even easier than I remember. A quick google landed me on the WSL install page. All it took was a quick:

wsl --install

Don’t skip the best practices page! You’ll probably want to do some of the suggestions and there’s some good tips as well.

Terminal Emulator #

I generally don’t use my terminal for much aside from input/output. I prefer tools I can take with me and that’s not often the case with terminal emulators.

The two things I’m looking for in a terminal are:

1. Performant. I’m only using this thing for input/output, so any extra features that hinder performance I gain nothing from.
2. Well supported/Easy to use. I don’t consider tinkering with my terminal a good use of my time (please let me know if I’m wrong). After I set my initial colors, font, and disable that annoying bell, I don’t want to touch it again.

I considered 3 options:

Windows Terminal #

I’ve always used this terminal with WSL in the past, primarily because it was the best supported. I started using WSL early on so there weren’t many other options. It was a bit slow at times, but it otherwise did what I wanted. This is my fallback if the other 2 don’t work out.

Alacritty #

After doing some research, I decided against Alacritty. Portability is cool, but given my limited dependence on terminal features it wasn’t a big draw for me. And a big deterrent was that windows appeared to be a second class citizen. That’s a big strike against well supported.

WezTerm #

I’d never heard of WezTerm before, though apparently it’s been around since 2019. It claims to be fast and that appears to be true. The support for it seemed decent as I was able to hobble together my desired config file pretty easily. From what I could tell Windows support is good.

One other thing that really piqued my interest was it’s ability to replace tmux. I primarily use tmux for the window/session management (I’m not often remoting in to servers doing local dev), so if I could drop tmux that would be a nice simplification to make. I spent a few hours following some guides trying to get an equivalent setup working, but unfortunately it fell short. It was close! The dealbreaker was lack of persistent sessions. I found some attempts at it by others, and while it looks like it might be possible, it was more work than I wanted to do. When it came to regular window/session usage it worked great! I was able to get to a nearly 1:1 setup with tmux.

Tmux replacement was a bonus, and WezTerm was enjoyable enough that I’ve decided to give it a shot. Worst case I’m back on windows terminal.

• Config file link (tmux parity config is there commented out)

Command Line Tools #

I prefer to spend the majority of my time in the command line. I don’t enjoy using a mouse, and CLI tools tend to be good time investments.

For all the tools below, installing these in WSL was no different than Ubuntu. The only WSL specific hiccup was getting copy/paste working in nvim.

ZSH #

I should invest more time into learning my shell but haven’t. I was a long time bash user until mac switched to zsh (most work laptops I’ve had are macs), so I use zsh now. I’d like to try fish shell one day, but zsh works for now. My usage of it is pretty entry level.

• Config file link

NeoVim #

I’ve been a long time Vim user, and switched to NeoVim awhile ago. It’s been around a long time and I like to believe the Lindy Effect is true.

Getting the clipboard working with WSL required a little extra config. I had to install win32 yank:

1. Download the exe from here: https://github.com/equalsraf/win32yank/releases
2. sudo mv win32yank.exe /usr/bin

then add this snippet to my nvim config:

-- WSL clipboard
vim.g.clipboard = {
    name = "win32yank-wsl",
    copy = {
        ["+"] = "win32yank.exe -i --crlf",
        ["*"] = "win32yank.exe -i --crlf",
    },
    paste = {
        ["+"] = "win32yank.exe -o --lf",
        ["*"] = "win32yank.exe -o --lf",
    },
    cache_enabled = true,
}
vim.opt.clipboard = "unnamedplus"

I could probably write a whole article about my nvim config, and maybe I will one day. For now it’s accessible below.

• Config file link

tmux #

Since I spend a lot of time in the CLI I need a tool to organize my various shells and groupings of shells (tmux sessions). I quickly found tmux after I started developing and have used it since. As mentioned above, my primary usage of it is managing various shells, but being comfortable with a tool to keep remote sessions alive is handy as well.

Missing the combo of tmux-resurrect and tmux-continuum are what kept me from replacing tmux with WezTerm.

• Config file link

All Done #

After I installed all the tools above (as well as some additional accompanying ones not covered, but are listed in the config files) I was all setup on WSL. All in all it took me a few hours and was a pretty enjoyable process!

Home