After upgrading to Win10 1809 (the infamous November 2018 rollout) and updating to the latest WSL Ubuntu build, I noticed a bunch of issues with my ConEmu/WSL setup.
Vim wasn't navigating as it should; ignoring input at random and text wasn't pasting properly into the command line. It seemed to be truncated randomly and I couldn't spot a pattern. Turns out there were some changes to the way input was encoded and I needed an update for ConEmu and use their wslbridge script.
I tried updating and the performance hit was awful. I had native WSL and bridged ConEmu side by side tailing the same log file and the bridge script was causing it to jitter uncomfortably.
Along the way I found an extremely helpful post by ropnop called "Configuring a pretty and usable terminal emulator for WSL". I didn't know it was possible to forward the X Window manager to... Windows! There was a detail or two missing (regarding firewall and dbus) but eventually I managed to get it working in a slightly simpler way (no need for vbscript).
Downloads
- VcXsrv Windows X Server (v1.20.1.4 at time of writing)
Setup
- Install VcXsrv and run XLaunch. The default settings are fine, but be sure to save the config so you can simply run the configuration to start X.
- Alternatively you can start it with:
"C:\Program Files\VcXsrv\vcxsrv.exe" :0 -ac -terminate -lesspointer -multiwindow -clipboard -wgl -dpi auto - Make sure the icon appears in the taskbar.
- Open up an instance of WSL Bash
- Start off with "sudo apt-get update"
- Followed by "sudo apt-get install dbus-x11 gnome-terminal" (you can substitute gnome-terminal with whatever terminal you'd prefer)
- Confirm install and let the downloads start
- While you're waiting, be sure to create a firewall rule to prevent anyone else from accessing your X server
- (Firewall setup) Go to "Windows Defender Firewall" and click on "Advanced settings" on the left
(I hate the labyrinth known as Windows 10 settings)
- Click on "Inbound Rules" under "Windows Defender Firewall ..."
- Right click > "New Rule" (or click on New Rule on the right panel)
- Rule type: Program
- Program path: C:\Program Files\VcXsrv\vcxsrv.exe (by default)
- Allow the connection
- Only apply to Private connections
- Then give the rule an appropriate name
- Edit the new rule you've created
- Go to the "Scope" tab and add 127.0.0.1 to both local and remote IP restrictions
- Apply and finish
- (Back to the terminal setup) Once it's done downloading, give dbus a kick start:
sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart - Test that window forwarding works by pasting this in:
DISPLAY=:0 gnome-terminal & - If it works, create an alias in ".bash_aliases" called "runterminal" with the following:
alias runterminal="DISPLAY=:0 terminator &"
- Finally, create a shortcut on your desktop to easily start gnome-terminal:
bash.exe -i -c "runterminal" - Set "Run" to minimised to avoid an unnecessary command prompt flicker.
- And now you're done!
