What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

Windows Console folk: any chance of tabs in the official terminal?<p>Current Windows terminal options:<p>- ConEmu: mainly excellent but a little dated - eg, the active tab color is hard to distinguish but it can&#x27;t be changed, apparently due to maintainer&#x27;s insistence it works on Windows XP.<p>- Hyper: excellent but Ctrl C, Ctrl R etc broken in powershell.<p>Adding tabs to the Windows console makes more sense than have a third party create an entire console just to support tabs.

The inotify implementation looks very promising! Editing source files in a Windows-native IDE and having changes picked up by, say, node.js is a great workflow.<p>I&#x27;m yet to try it out, but I wonder if the problems with editing files in the linux filesystem[0] is going to be an issue with this?<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;commandline&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;17&#x2F;do-not-change-linux-files-using-windows-apps-and-tools&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;commandline&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;17&#x2F;do-n...</a>

So what is the end game with WSL? What is it that MS is actually trying to do?<p>I remember the NT POSIX subsystem, which was a bit of a joke. It was badly limited and just seemed to be a box ticking exercise to get past some government requirements (disclaimer: I don&#x27;t actually know if that&#x27;s true). Whatever the reason, we ended up having to port our POSIX software to NT because customers insisted it was POSIX complient. I did resent MS for the mess we got into.<p>I do believe MS has changed. They don&#x27;t seem to be the conniving organisation they once were, but what does WSL bring to Windows?<p>Perhaps, they are just accepting that there is something inevitable about all that Linux software that is available out there, and Linux developers could now be supporting Windows with no actual effort. After all Apple have saved themselves a load of effort by using Netbsd. However, something makes me wary. Could we be looking at an attempt to replace the Linux kernal on the servers of the world?

Hats off to Rich, Russ, and the entire WSL team at Microsoft. Another excellent release. Your work here bringing Ubuntu and the open source world to the Windows ecosystem makes us very, VERY proud!

I have switched to WSL pretty exactly a month ago after using solely Ubuntu for about 6 years. So far it works like a charm. The only small problem i have had was the network interface problem with nodejs (which should be solved with the new WSL). But that can be circumvented by simply running node.exe instead. The reason for the switch was: windows in great for everything UI, bash is great for everything development.

WOW. cmd can actually parse escape codes now AND run Linux scripts! What a time to be alive.<p>I&#x27;ve been using WSL for the last year now on my Surface Pro 4, and it has been nothing short of fantastic. This bridges a HUGE gap that made the MacBook attractive.

Symlinks!<p>Windows has always been such a pain in the ass with regard to symlinks (my revision control workflow for big projects spread across multiple repos always includes symlinks). So, this is cool.

Ok, this is awesome, if everything works as advertised.<p>I have been mostly a Linux user for quite some time - at least on my own computer, clients always have Windows. But this year I bought a Surface Pro as a secondary device.<p>I first evaluated WSL and really liked it, but I switched to Hyper+Git Bash because networking in node.js was not working properly, and because I could not start Windows programs from the command line.<p>Now, if both problems are really fixed now, I guess I will switch back to WSL, and maybe uninstall Hyper+Git Bash later (given that I do not find any other show stoppers)...

This is brilliant. I might actually consider switching to Windows now. Both Arch and macOS have been getting on my nerves lately.

&gt;Upgrade In-Place ...though this may not result in an optimal instance.<p>Wondering why such a disclaimer? Ubuntu apt upgrades are reliable. Or is it related to WSL? Anyway good job WSL team.

Windows Console question here! :)<p>Are there any plans to support GNU Readline shortcuts such as history searching with Ctrl-R directly in the Windows Console?<p>I&#x27;m mostly using WSL to run the PostgreSQL CLI with the standard keyboard behavior. It would be nice to be able to do that without having to install WSL.

Why on that ping screenshot RTT to 127.0.0.1 is &gt;2ms?

Please disable file notified hooks for files in WSL. One of the big reasons why I prefer to work on linux in office like environments is because Symantec etc heavily hook file IO on windows making things like compilation &#x2F; checkout very slow compared to linux. When WSL came out I was hoping it would sidestep the slow hooked IO problem in windows but some investigation revealed that file modified &#x2F; created hooks are still triggered for files in WSL. Any change of this being removed?

But did they fix ctrl-space? [1]<p>As an emacs user, this single issue has been the show-stopper that prevented me from investing in bash on windows, even though I would like to.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;superuser.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;1088250&#x2F;windows-10-linux-bash-shell-ctrlspace-doesnt-set-mark-in-emacs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;superuser.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;1088250&#x2F;windows-10-linux-bas...</a>

For me Microsoft has realized that their profit on cloud (where Linux is dominant) can be significantly higher then licensing Windows, so they are pushing for a better Linux experience on the user desktop and we will see in a couple of years the Microsoft Linux Server (maybe they will buy Cannonical for that ?).

Any news on getting Python autocomplete within VSC pointed at a virtualenv on WSL?

&gt; In Windows 10 Creators Update, you can now launch Windows apps &amp; tools from within Bash …<p>Can anyone verify if this means you can run the Docker for Windows <i>client</i> (the docker and docker-compose executables, not the engine) from within WSL, including from shell scripts?<p>If so, I can&#x27;t wait to try it out, since that&#x27;s about the last thing preventing me from using my usual Linux&#x2F;MacOS dev workflow in Windows!<p>Unfortunately I&#x27;m running an Enterprise version of Windows, and the upgrade tool doesn&#x27;t support Enterprise yet, so I&#x27;ll probably have to wait for it to come through Windows Update.

Only thing I wish they could do is make calling Linux programs from Windows a bit more natural. Yeah &quot;bash -c&quot; works, but it&#x27;s not exactly ideal.

Still not any option to hide that ugly scrollbar and having unlimited buffer ? (like Gnome-Terminal)

Does that mean I can change the font without editing the registry now?<p>Now that there is 24-bit color, is there actually a reasonable way to change the colorscheme, or are you still stuck with the same UI?<p>As far as I can tell, this is the first major overhaul of CMD. Full stop. We&#x27;ve been waiting.

Wasn&#x27;t mouse support in the console for decades as well? At least it has worked in Far for ages. Or is just the integration with Linux console applications new?

As usual lovely to see headway on this. With the networking improvements I&#x27;m hoping mosh will be supported natively. Excited to try this out.

I used the &quot;Remove &amp; replace&quot; method and it installed 14.04 again :&#x2F;

This is great! Congrats to the team for delivering a great update!

Anyone tried deploying a linux program on windows via WSL?

I just run VcXsrv and launch gnome terminal. Works fine.

Cygwin works great.

This is truly amazing. GG Microsoft.

Though it says it&#x27;s for developers, hopefully eventually it would be easier to turn on so anyone can easily run command line Linux programs?

The interop opens up new possibilities.

Bash for Windows... Bash is a Unix shell. Linux is an operating system. Completely different concepts.<p>Bash on Windows has existed for decades now, through Cygwin. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cygwin.com&#x2F;cgi-bin2&#x2F;package-cat.cgi?file=x86_64%2Fbash%2Fbash-4.4.11-2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cygwin.com&#x2F;cgi-bin2&#x2F;package-cat.cgi?file=x86_64%2Fba...</a><p>Trying to reduce the entire GNU&#x2F;Linux ecosystem to &quot;Bash&quot; is insulting to the community you are trying to appeal to:<p>Linux is an immensely large and complex project, which has millions of lines of code. The GNU part of GNU&#x2F;Linux has a couple of more millions of lines of code as well. Bash is small in comparison.