You may want to scroll down and see all the updates

I’ve always been using Mac for programming since my first job. I don’t actually own one myself because the company always give me one. Since I bought a thinkpad, I started to setup emacs on windows WSL:

WSL & Hyper (a fancy terminal)

After this, you may want to use zsh and switch hyper’s default shell to zsh.

Zsh

You may want to know where the hyper configuration file is: C:\\Users\\${USER}\\.hyper.js

Shadowsocks & Proxychains.

For people like me in China, we all need this one more step…

Emacs & VcXsrv

It’s not perfect. It’s slow af. The text is blurry and Chinese characters are a mess. But I think I can take it after all this trouble.

Update 1:

I can’t visit my local hexo server through 127.0.0.1:4000. After searching for a while, It turns out that it’s wegame’s fault (link). To solve this, you need to delete %systemroot%\system32\drivers\QMTgpNetflow764.sys and restart your computer. Or just uninstall wegame.

Update 2:

Ubuntu 18.04 is out: link.

Update 3:

I got rid of hyper and use this terminal now. Since it supports 24bits color, I only use emacs in terminal mode now. NO MORE X11 SERVER AND SHIT.

Update 4:

I just found an X-server on windows 10 that just works out of box: x410. It works on my 2k screen (export GDK_SCALE=2); Copy and paste works; It’s the only X-server that truly supports fullscreen-frame with my spacemacs; I can pin linux programes to windows taskbar, though it’s kinda time-consuming. Here are all the files: gist, it contains:

Keep in mind that you must change the scripts according to where you put the scripts. I have them in E:\wsl. Also if you don’t have x410, just use VcXsrv or any other X-server instead. All you need to do is comment out the lines with x410 and change it. For example, to use emacs.bat with VcXsrv.

REM here I use another keyboard layout, just remove it if you don't need it.

"C:\\Program Files\\VcXsrv\\vcxsrv.exe" -clipboard -wgl -nohostintitle -silent-dup-error -multiwindow -xkblayout us -xkbvariant dvorak

REM here I use my custom script to start emacs (ec), you can just uses emacs instead.

ubuntu1804.exe run "cd ~; export DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0.0;  /home/merlin/.spacemacs.d/script/ec"

It it now a much more acceptable development workflow on windows.

WSL emacs workflow screenshot

Update 5:

I couldn’t get native Linux docker to work, a work around is to install Windows version of docker and just use docker.exe since WSL and Linux share PATHs its more convenient than it sounds. But then I found this issue, to fix this:

sudo mkdir /e
sudo mount --bind /mnt/e /e

From now on just use /e instead.

Update 6:

Ubuntu 20.04 is out: link.

Update 7:

WSL 2.0 is out: link. In order to use it with X410, add this line to your startup script:

export DISPLAY=$(cat /etc/resolv.conf | grep nameserver | awk '{print $2; exit;}'):0.0

As you can see, WSL’s ip address is no longer 127.0.0.1. You need to change all scripts with DISPLAY viriable in it.

Update 8:

I wrote my own emacs configuration now, I’ll talk about it more in later article.