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
  • 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.