2 minutes
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
I don’t use a Windows system on a day-to-day basis but I wanted to configure WSL on Windows since I’m much more familiar with navigating linux than using powershell.
Installing WSL
Following this article on Microsoft Learn, I tried to install WSL but ran into some issues afterwards. I was receiving an error through the Terminal
app on Windows 11:
Installing, this may take a few minutes...
WslRegisterDistribution failed with error: 0x80370114
Error: 0x80370114 The operation could not be started because a required feature is not installed.
Press any key to continue...
I manually enabled the features in Turn Windows features On or Off
then restarted:
Virtual Machine Platform
Windows Hypervisor Platform
Windows Subsystem for Linux
Using WSL
wsl --list
shows all the Linux distros installed and wsl -d <distro>
launches the distro.
In WSL, the C Drive is mounted in /mnt/c/
so I was able to use linux to navigate to all of my Windows files in /mnt/c/Users/<user>
#hooray!
Everything else seemed the same as a regular Linux system including having a home directory in /home/<user>
.
ZSH on WSL
It looks like by default it runs bash and I wanted to switch to zsh and install Powerlevel10k.
- Install zsh:
sudo apt install zsh
- Install Oh my zsh!:
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)
- Set theme to Powerlevel10k:
git clone https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-$HOME/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/themes/powerlevel10k
- Install MesloLGS NF fonts on Windows 11 and change it in the default profile in Terminal
- Hit
CTRL + ,
to open Terminal settings - Profiles > Defaults > Appearance > Font face > MesloLGS NF
- Hit
- Then run
p10k configure
to configure it
I thought this was pretty cool as it was my first time using WSL. My experience with powershell is limited so I thought this would be helpful for me to navigate my Windows system faster.