Invoke Win32 applications with Bash on Windows

This finally makes bash on windows functional. It was one of its limitations that made it feel disconnected from the rest of Windows.

Wow, this is really impressive. Last time I worked with bash on Windows it felt like isolated island. But with this. I think it is a viable option right now. The only down side to it is slow file system operations. Compiling a single toy kernel (xv6) would take much longer than Linux.<p>This is amazing, now I can have emacs server in Linux running through bash with windows service manager.<p>This is fucking awesome. I hope they improve thing further and further.<p>The only and biggest problem : Windows ridiculous conemu. I am not going use a console which I can&#x27;t resize without any problem. For the sake of God they don&#x27;t have unlimited buffer option and hide scrollbar (permanently) or resize window without messing up text.

There&#x27;s a lot more technical information in this post (scroll below the video for diagrams and writeup): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;wsl&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;19&#x2F;windows-and-ubuntu-interoperability&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;wsl&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;19&#x2F;windows-and-...</a>

Now they just need a better terminal emulator. Windows 10 made some minor but much needed adjustment, but I still end up using Cmdr (a nicely preconfigured ConEmu), and it&#x27;s decent enough, but it pales over a nicely configured iTerm2 or what most popular Linux distros come with out of the box.

We&#x27;re not on Windows 10 yet at my workplace, and I don&#x27;t use Windows at home, so I&#x27;ve only been following loosely in a &quot;this will be nice once I&#x27;m finally able to use it&quot; way. But this bit took me by surprise:<p>&gt; 1 Use the same working directory as the CMD or PowerShell prompt &gt; 2 Are run under as the WSL default user &gt; 3 Have the same Windows administrative rights as the calling process and terminal<p>1 and 3 are not surprising. But 2? There&#x27;s a WSL default user? Windows users aren&#x27;t automatically mapped to unique Linux users? That seems problematic in theory. How does it work out in practice?

If there&#x27;s ever been a great opportunity to open source something in the Windows client, it&#x27;s WSL. A number of popular User Voice feature requests were closed recently as not in scope, which is reasonable on the part of the WSL team but shows that the demand for Linux-on-Windows is much greater than the team&#x27;s current objectives. If the project was open source and the team accepted patches who knows where this thing could go. People want to run X, they want device emulation, they want to run all kinds of apps that aren&#x27;t necessarily dev tools.

Oh, that&#x27;s nice. That&#x27;s what I was looking for in the first place.<p>As I&#x27;m reading the comments I keep seeing things that other people want to do that I never thought of...that&#x27;s awesome.

I&#x27;m guessing this solves:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12715945" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12715945</a>

Embrace, extend and invoke? ;)