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

sudo / elevate on Windows 11

Windows has never had a native sudo or elevation feature.

Of course if you write the correct Power Shell commands you can make this happen, but what we really want is convenience.

There are various packages around to help out and various ways to install them.

And in Windows 11 with a new package manager, installing one of them as never been so easy.

Read more