I recently set up a development environment on my windows computer, using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

This lets you effectively install a Linux OS on top of windows that works seamlessly with windows tools, and it's so much better than my previous experience of trying to develop on windows.

Basic setup

1. Install WSL

2. Install a tabbed terminal (Optional - I expect this will be fixed eventually, but the current default terminal is pretty useless)

3. Set up Visual Code to work with WSL

4. Install Docker into WSL

These steps will let you work with Visual Code and terminals, and things will mostly just work as if you were actually working on Linux.

You can also run any Docker command from within WSL (after running apt install docker) and it will use the Docker daemon provided by Docker for Windows.

(Optional) Configure the tabbed terminal

The terminal is a bit fiddly to configure as it requires editing a JSON file. You can open it by pressing CTRL+,

The profile settings look like this:

{
    "guid": "{2c4de342-38b7-51cf-b940-2309a097f518}",
    "hidden": false,
    "name": "Ubuntu",
    "source": "Windows.Terminal.Wsl",
    "colorScheme": "One Half Dark",
    "fontSize": 15
},

At a minimum I would recommend changing the color scheme. Even after swapping out the terminal app, I found the default colors hard to read against a dark background.

For more info about the options you can refer to the Windows Terminal documentation.

WSL is pretty cool

So far I've been really impressed with how well this all works.

If you want to know more about WSL, I recommend this Hanselminutes podcast: Inside Linux on Windows with WSL and Tara Raj

Windows 10 runs Linux natively! How is that possible? Scott talks to Microsoft's Tara Raj, the Program Manager for the Windows Subsystem for Linux. How does this technology work? Tara explains the internals of WSL to Scott in this episode.