Developing on Windows, the WSL life

The Windows developer experience has evolved quite allot in the last 5-10 years. I now spend most of my development life running Windows with WSL2 and using Windows Terminal and winget. So here are a few pointers from my experiences so far.

WSL (WSL2)

WSL2 is what you want! The first version of WSL was a step in a great direction, but had many cons, such as IO performance. It should be fairly easy to install and will provide you a full Linux Kernel accessible from within Windows.

WSL also has access to your Windows filesystem via a mount at /mnt/c. Generally if you are using Linux tooling, you’ll want your file access to remain in the Linux file system. For example, I have almost all of my git repositories checked out in my Linux file system. For the odd repository that I use mainly Windows tooling I leave in Windows land.

Read more

Adding git bash to Windows terminal

I just saw a tweet saying that Windows terminal is now generally available, so I had to give it a try.

After downloading from the store and booting up I realized that only powershell, cmd and wsl are listed by default (and also Azure which I don’t really care about).

Clicking around the UI a little there is a settings menu item that opens a JSON configuration file in notepad. This configuration file defines the behaviours of the terminal including the profiles that can be loaded.

After a bit of searching and documentation reading I came up with this profile which I now use for my git bash installation (I hope it can help you too).

Read more