Csdrhrt

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) works pretty well for making most commandline Linux tools available and working on Windows without modification. However, it gets a little tricky for development, when one wants to

• Build a project using a Linux toolchain that doesn't have a well-supported Windows equivalent (Ruby, Node, etc)


• Edit files using a Windows-based GUI editor such as Visual Studio code.

The problem is that Windows apps cannot modify files inside the virtual lxss filesystem. Directly modifying these files is known to cause all sorts of issues.

Therefore, there seem to be only two suboptimal choices when it comes to using WSL for development:

1. Store the project under lxss (/home/foo). The normal toolchain works properly. However, editing is limited to either terminal-based Vim/Emacs or whatever can be run under a janky X server, which is less smooth than native editors running on Windows.




2. Store the project under the Windows filesystem (/mnt/c/Users/foo). Now any Windows-based editor can be used for development. However, the Linux-based toolchain is fragile as it's not designed to be used on a "network drive", and can cause problems with file watching or databases.

Is there any way to get the best of both worlds here - that is, to be able to edit using a native Windows application, but still have the Linux toolchain work as it normally would on a local drive?

You can open Windows programs from within WSL, but you need to convert file paths if you want to open Windows files with Windows programs from inside WSL. wsltools will do this for you.

If you open vscode from WSL then it will wait for it to close, so you'll know when it's done with whatever files it was editing. The database problems you mentioned mostly stem from things like inotify not responding to events that would trigger it in Linux. Unfortunately, this isn't implemented in WSL yet so there's no good way for a Linux application to know when some other Windows process closes a file.

I'm sure smarter people than me have looked at this question. But I'll answer it. I honestly believe the answer is currently no. There is better way to get the best of both worlds, other than the ones you have mentioned (That I know of).

I'm sure it's not the answer anyone wants, but I think it's the correct answer. I know it's something that Microsoft is trying to make more smooth, but it's not there yet.

In the first half of 2018, Microsoft released some improvements to WSL that address some of these issues:

• In Insider Build 17063 and later, filesystem improvements allow Linux utilities to see more of what they expect on DrvFs files.


• Since late 2017, Visual Studio Code is able to run the WSL version of Node directly.

Neither of these wholly address the issues in my original question, but they may improve usability in certain specific cases.