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Is there a shell+terminal+font combo that folks really like for WSL? I've tried the new terminal beta with zsh and--for reasons I can't quite articulate right now--it feels "off" and I invariably proceed to boot up virtualbox for my debian, i3, kitty, fira code setup to get work done. Maybe it's the break in filesystems and $HOME?

Edit: learning that WSL2 does away with the syscall-translating tech and mandates Hyper-V, the question of whether to look into this further becomes thornier!



https://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToMakeAPrettyPromptInWindo...

Been using terminal and 2 row powerline. It’s amazing. Hard to go back to conemu or similar in windows.


I'm a big fan of using wsltty. Everything works and it has very low input latency. I run tmux and terminal Vim in it every day for hours of coding.

Screenshots of my terminal and set up are in my dotfiles https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles.

It looks exactly the same as xterm on my native Linux laptop.

I've even gone as far as running i3 through WSL1 / wsltty and it worked very well with 1 monitor. I stopped using it because I have 2 monitors, but if I had 1 monitor it would have been usable for day to day development.


Windows Terminal uses grayscale instead of subpixel antialiasing by default. They recently added the ability to turn on subpixel antialiasing. (I'm not sure if that's what you mean by "off".)


Windows Terminal is made by the same guys working on WSL and works pretty well: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

You can get it via the Microsoft Store and it comes with support for connecting to WSL, Powershell, and cmd.exe out of the box.


Seconding Windows Terminal. I happen to also really like the font that comes with it -- Cascadia Code. But I'm a sucker for ligatures.


It solves the colour problem but the default is annoying to windows side. Should remember last one used.


I think that’s the “new terminal beta” they were talking about.


I've been using cmder with Consolas for years now, and I love it.

It supports tab, and is very configurable (thankfully there is a search box in the settings dialog!)

Can't recommend it enough.


I use Cmdr (with solarized theme and Consolas font) with Zsh and Oh My Zsh (with agnoster theme), but it is really a matter of taste.


Another happy cmder and Consolas user here! Never used Zsh tho - what benefits does it have?


For one thing, with Oh My Zsh, you can use nice themes like this: https://github.com/agnoster/agnoster-zsh-theme

Zsh have a long list of nice features that Bash lacks. Two of my favourites:

1. Imagine you are in a directory with file1.ext and file2.ext. You type f[TAB], it autocompletes it to file. So far, Bash and Zsh are the same. If you continue pressing [TAB], bash prints a list of files so you can complete typing the name yourself. Zsh starts cycling through filenames.

2. In Zsh, you can type for example /u/lo/b[TAB] and it automatically expands the path to /usr/local/bin. If multiple paths match the original expression, it shows a list and pressing tab cycles through the options.

Zsh is quite feature-rich, and for the most part a drop-in replacement for Bash. See this slide deck for more Zsh awesomeness:

https://www.slideshare.net/jaguardesignstudio/why-zsh-is-coo...




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