A Linux Dev Environment on Windows with WSL 2, Docker Desktop and More

hey there Nick Jerrett ak is here in this video we're going to go over how I have my windows 10 box set up to be a very nice Linux based development environment on Windows so a couple of years ago I actually created a very very similar video and it ended up being one of the most popular videos I released on YouTube you know we went over all sorts of different tools that I have installed on windows as well as what I have installed inside of wsl but fast forward to today mid 2020 Microsoft released that spring 2020 update that allows us to use WSL too so I figured now it'd be a great time to make a new version of that video so here we are so just a heads up if you're using any version of Windows 10 that could be home Pro enterprise or student as long as you have that spring 20 20 update all the tools that we're gonna go over now you'll be able to install as well also speaking of installing tools you know this is not going to be like a 15 hour video where we do like a Ground Zero installation and configuration of all these tools it's basically going to be more like a high-level overview /dr why of all the tools that I use and if along the way you find a tool that you like you can always go to the description and then click the link there for whatever tool you've found and you can install it on your own usually most of these tools it's a matter of just downloading some like executable file or an MSI and then you just double click it hit OK or next a couple of times and you're good to go now when it comes to more complicated things like setting up wsl - or maybe configuring docker desktop then I will show how I do that on video just so you can follow along easily and when it comes to installing all the stuff onto wsl - you know inside of an abundant when to4 LTS release then I do have all that stuff documented on my dot files which we'll go over as well so you'll be able to basically copy paste commands and get set up in about five or ten minutes so what that said let's just go at it so one of the first tools that I have here is this launcher tool where I just hit alt space on the keyboard and it brings up this fuzzy finder launcher where you can just start typing like whatever program that you want to launch that could be Firefox you know that could be Chrome that could be like some IRC client that I have but it can also be a calculator as well so if you just want to do some math and then maybe copy the results to the clipboard you can do that very very easily so I'm going to launch Firefox here which by the way happens you use Chrome typically but I'm using Firefox for the video just I don't have to worry about you know blurring out my history there so this tool that we just looked at the launcher is called power toys and it is actually created by Microsoft so if you've googled for like power twice github you'll find a link here and it goes over all sorts of different things that are included with power twice because it's not just this little run utility that allows us to launch apps it also includes a couple of other ones here now I don't want to spend too long in this section because you know I could totally make another video just on power toys alone and spend 20 minutes talking about that but just know that you get a couple of cool things here like to be able to do both renaming and regular expression search from windows or even mess around with like a semi tiled winner window manager called fancy zones so the idea with that one is basically and I don't want to show this one because I really don't use fancy zone much yet but that could be something I use in the future but yeah the idea is it can like bucket off different areas of your screen and then you can just open programs and have them get loaded into those buckets and then you can set up different layouts and yeah it's quite nice so I use a 3 on my native Linux laptop big fan of using the tiled window manager so now let's go over maybe a terminal because terminals are pretty important as a developer at least for me so the term law I'm using right now is the Microsoft terminal which is pretty surprising if you've watched a whole bunch of my videos in the past you'll know that I've been using wsl TTY but I switched to this terminal for a number of reasons one wsl 2 came out and there's this little drop-down box here with this terminal that allows you to switch between different wsl 1 or 2 distros very easily and I really like that feature and two of the input latency in this terminal is amazing so I'm just holding down my key now and there's like absolutely no delay at all when typing you know it is extremely fast it's like typing on air and for me you know if I'm typing in the terminal all the time low input latency is very very important so if you want to install this terminal it's pretty easy you just do you Windows key s to bring up your window search and then you can just do a search for Microsoft Store and from here all you have to do is do a search for terminal and there we go you can just click the app and then install up so if this has no bearing on you know kneading WSL installed so you can totally install this before anything if you want to but now speaking of WSL so if i run an LSB fleece here you can see that I am running ubuntu 2004 LTS you know that is running inside of WS l2 so if you actually want to run w SL 2 you can just Google for like enable WS l2 and there's some black post up here which of course I'm going to link in the description it's basically a step by step on how to get all set up but the TLDR basically comes down to this you need to control us here and do a search for I think windows features should do it yeah turn Windows Features on or off and then from here down here there is this window subsystem for Linux it might be checked off for you so go ahead and check that to make it enabled you might need to also reboot after that I'm not really 100% than that so if you need to do that I'll see you in a few so now it's like okay you just rebooted WSL is enabled now you need to open up a pair of shell prompt which you can do from this terminal right you can just go here click PowerShell and then you can run some command from there but in this case you'll want to copy paste this command which basically says that when you install any wsl distro it is going to by default set you up to use wsl to cool so now that you have wsl to set up the next step is to install some linux distro of your choice so you can go back to the Windows Store here and then you can do a search for if you want to do my exact setup you would do a search for a bun too and then from here you'll just go ahead and install Ubuntu 20.0 for LTS that was released I think judge April 2020 something like that or yeah pretty close to that I don't know why it has so many poor reviews but for me it's been working fantastic I think a lot of folks just weren't able to get it up and running on WS l1 and so they gave it like a one-star review but we're using WS l2 so it is totally good to go as for installing this itself it's like you know once you get it all and launched up the first time you set it up it's going to ask you to create like a Linux username and password that's super straightforward stuff I think you'll be able to get going on that without any additional assistance so here we go we have the terminal here right you have WSL to setup now I don't know about you but I'm a very big fan of using docker I've been using docker since about 2014 so most of my web apps are docker eyes so I have examples for flask phoenix node web pack and more just sitting here on my dev box now before we get into configuring and installing docker desktop I kind of just wanted to do maybe like a two-second TL DR or maybe like a 2-minute TL DR and like what the workflow is like for working with docker and by the way I just launched Emacs here which is a way to basically split terminals in half and do many more things I don't want to get too deep into that right now I have many videos on my youtube channel about vim and Emacs and by the way speaking of vim if you don't want to run vim inside of WS l2 and you prefer using V s code instead totally fine because the V s code integration on Windows with WS l2 is fantastic so over here the docker compose setup it just starts up a flask server Postgres Redis celery and even web pack over here and it's all are ready to go in about three seconds now if I go to localhost 40000 this is the web application from the build of SAS at the flash course you know we build a SAS up here and but the idea is I just want to show you what it's like to maybe like hack on the project and then see the things reload and we're not gonna really write too much code here and by the way that's another windows tip if you drag the window to the left like that and click the other one you can now drag these two windows in unison and it's pretty decent for doing like side by side things like this so let me just go ahead and open up them and I'll go to my home page template here and if you take a look here at the feeling lucky we see on the left and the right I'm just going to make a very quick modification to that you know add some exclamation points go over here and reload of course it could hit ctrl R to reload there but you know I just wanted to show it for the sake of the video but you can see here that you know I reloaded very very fast you know if I bring that back to what it was before and reload it's like boom basically instant like I'm never waiting for docker to build something it's very fast on docker desktop on Windows fortunately it was actually very fast with WS l1 as well as long as you had Windows 10 Pro but now with WSL 2 it's fast all around with all version of Windows and you can think like well you know maybe it's not that much of work to like reload a simple like ginger template with flask like what is it like maybe working with you know like a style sheet file that's large like a SAS file so if I go down here and I just make like a modification here you know maybe I'll just do like a I don't know if I can type today like background color I'll do like a green or something like that and then reload that and go here and reload then immediately it's green and if I go back to my other terminal here and scroll up we can see that web packed you know picked up that change that incremental change and it just reloaded you know all that sass down into CSS in eight hundred and sixty milliseconds and I'm recording a video you know usually that's done in about half that time so you know even if you have like a really big JavaScript application what tons of CSS then you know everything is going to be amazing like even with web pack it's very very fast with this wsl to set up now let me just close this out here and this is the beauty of docker like we're done working on the project and it's done so if I had another project with like different dependencies and versions or whatever I can just docker compose up that and it works so now let's talk a little bit maybe about installing and configuring dr desktop to work with WSL too so you can just go and do a search for you know docker desktop for windows and one of these links down here yep the products link which i'll make sure to link in the description as well and man i am sweating over here like 90 degrees out so hot but yeah if you go to window stable down here and install that you just need to install that in your own you know you may need to reboot afterwards it's not really a big deal you can just hit okay next next next whatever whatever and you're off to the races and if you do need to reboot i'll see you in a second now I'm going to also hide myself here for a second because now it's time to configure dr. desktop so if you go and take a look here at the darker rail you can just right click that and go to settings and that's going to launch the darker settings the things that won't want to make sure that are enabled or make sure that there's checkbox is on for use that WS l2 based engine also if you're concerned about privacy you can always turn off send the usage stats then in the resources tab we have WSL integration yeah just make sure that this checkbox is enabled and this is also turned on and if you modify these you know you'll need to apply and restart so in a couple of minutes or whatever doctor is going to restart and then you'll be good to go you can always verify it works by running doctor space info and this will confirm that your WSL to instance is capable of connecting to doctor desktop you can also have run docker compose dash just to make sure that you have compose available as well you know this is much nicer than the old wso one set up where you need to kind of you know in securely configure docker desktop and then install like the doctor see a lion and compose like all that stuff goes away like right now dr. desktop alone is all you need to get this fantastic integration good stuff so now that we talked about docker for a bit let's give it a break and maybe talk about some other stuff like things that helped me in my day to day as I could developer working on Windows and maybe for that I'm just gonna go to my website here I have a users page that has a list of all the tools that I use now since this video is unscripted you know I want to make sure that I don't forget anything on this list so we talked about yeah using WSL to with Ubuntu and there's an important one here like VC xserve and we'll get to that in a second but basically that's going to allow us to share our clipboard between WS l2 and windows as well as maybe even run graphical apps inside of WS l2 if you want but yeah let's go every duck spot for now well you know we'll get to that in a second because that's gonna involve like fiddling around with some config files to get that up and running so Dec spot is a way to basically manage virtual workspaces so right now you know you just see one browser here I have this terminal behind it and this is like workspace number one but if I actually hit alt two on my keyboard things just went away but they didn't quite go away the right here so I hit alt one to go back to that so a deck spot is a way to basically do like virtualized desktops like different workspaces and the reason why I use this instead of the built-in one from Windows is like these are all assignable by hotkeys and the really really really sweet thing is like let's say that I opened up this you know Internet Explorer window here and let's say that I want to send that over to workspace 2 so I can just hit alt shift 2 and it goes away here and if I hit all 2 now there it is over here and if I want to send it back to number 1 I do alt shift 1 and then I do alt 1 and it's back to here so like if you're working on many different windows different projects maybe you just want to have like you know a like a photo editor in like one of these workspaces and then switch to it quickly like that's the way to go so right now I actually have two so I very much like to have things open on both of them but I can see like if I only had one monitor like the workspaces would be amazing so to get text pot up and running you just do a search for a deck spot install or whatever and you'll find that again you just click through like next next next and you have it and you're done I didn't have to really configure anything all of those hotkeys are just the defaults so let's move on here into this list here what else so we went over the code editor a little bit so like I use vim and you know in my dot files we'll go over the configuration for that really quick like yeah we're not going to spend a ton of time there terminal yep using the Microsoft terminal we went over that before how am i doing on time yeah this is gonna be one hell of a video in terms of length at least so FCF very cool thing for wsl too it's a basically a way to like fuzzy search your history and other great things so that's really part of my WSL to set up so maybe we'll postpone that until we go over looking at the dot files but now let's talk a little bit more about some notable apps so we went over dr. docker compose yep that all works with WSL - I still do use ditto to manage multiple clipboards that's one that I had from a couple of years ago and like half the comments in the YouTube video like literally like a hundred of them were like but Windows has built-in support for multiple clip words I know I know I know the really cool thing about ditto is it actually lets you search the history of that whereas the Windows one does not at least not as of right now you know maybe in the future that'll change so what's really cool about ditto is like you know let's say that I have this paragraph over here or set R or sentence or whatever you know I just hit ctrl C a couple times you know that is in my clipboard right now right but now if I go and just maybe you know select notable apps and I open up a new tab here and paste that you know there's no notable apps but let's say I want to get back to the previous thing that I just copied and I want to paste that instead like this one over here so I can actually do ctrl alt + V and that is going to bring up this over here which is ditto I understand that windows a little bit small but basically it's basically a history of all of things that I copied to my clipboard so you can see like the 800 militate hundred and 60 milliseconds that actually got copied to my clipboard just from selecting it and the really great thing is you know if I want to search for 860 like I can just go to that like that's the main feature of why I used it out instead of just using the built-in one from Microsoft so installing this is also pretty easy like ditto clipboard manager or something like that like that will get you going yep pure it is from SourceForge and yeah you can just download that 64-bit one and you are good to go you know that's something you want to also make sure that you have startup on Windows so in the settings there just make sure that you enable it to start when Windows boots up very very handy so what else do we have here yeah so previously I was using that key purina like I still can't pronounce it two years later but then you know I switched to Microsoft power toys to use the app launcher Auto hotkeys is amazing for doing all sorts of great things like for example I'm gonna hit Windows key T right now and that's going to launch a brand new terminal or I can hit Windows key gonna launch Chrome which is my typical web browser or I can do like Windows key I to open up which is what I used to do photo editing like if I want to make a YouTube thumbnail or something like that the reason why I don't use Photoshop is because one of these days I'm actually going to switch to native Linux and runs there but Photoshop does not and I don't want to worry about you know running it inside of like a Windows VM or something like that now Auto hockey is important there because Auto hockey is powering how all of these hotkeys work so if I go to github.com slash nick JJ that files there is one thing that I do need to show now if I go to where is this at yes blah blah blah app data roaming I think startup yeah and don't worry like I'm just skimming over this because it's not too important and what I wanted to show you was the autohotkey script to make this work so this is really sweet you can like assign different hotkeys that you want to do like when I hit Windows key I that just launches or you know these are other programs that I have installed as well you know these are all on my data files and we'll get to this in due time but you can also do very interesting things with Auto hockey like remapping your keys so since I work at them all the time you know hitting Escape is something you do all the time in vim and reaching all the way to the Escape key is crazy and I never really use cap locks so I just use autohotkey to swap the two so now when I hit cap locks it's actually hitting escape and this works system-wide it's not just inside of vim so that's something that's you know saves me from reaching all the way there and autohotkey is one of these tools where I can do like I'd like a two hour video on it but just know that it's like one of the best tools ever for Windows when it comes to like automating stuff so if you do autohotkey like Windows or something like that well learn to spell Nick learn to spell its autohotkey comm apparently yeah you can just download it here get that all set up and you're good to go also when it comes to Auto hockey you'll probably want that autohotkey script to come up every time you boot your computer so if I hide myself here again and I go to the sis tray you can see that I do have that autohotkey script sitting here and like there's the one for ditto as well but I'm pretty sure that one just has an option in the app to do that but one way to get something like this autohotkey script to come up when windows starts is to place it in a very specific folder location so in your case you know you would replace Nick here with your user name but that's this is a long path that you need to actually place the script in in fact if you do a Windows key s and then you do a search for run you can run shell startup and that's going to basically open up this folder location that we're looking at here on github and here we can see that autohotkey script width which is the same one that's in github right behind me you'll notice here too that I have a couple of other things we'll go over these in due time like this one is related to the vcx serve and that sizer is also another tool from this list here I think if I go down here where is that yeah it was right after Auto hockey so sizer is a pretty useful tool at least for me as someone who records videos I don't know if it's going to be super useful you but the basic idea is typically when I'm recording videos I'm actually not really ever recording my entire screen unless I'm doing a video like this where I want to like showcase Windows instead like my my desktop is 2560 by 1440 and I basically just want to record 1080p videos so really what I would like to do and this is how I have it set up with like OBS as I tell OBS like look go ahead and record like this specific area of my screen like pixel perfect but for me to remember like exactly where to position this window and size it would be insane and like if I wanted to do it for a different window it would be a super tedious process so what size are I just hit ctrl window key Z pick this 1080p option and this actually moved to the exact point where it needs to be so just to be a little more explicit here you know let's say this window we're like sitting over here you know I just do this and that and boom it's already magically we're not magically but it's setup exactly how I want like if my terminal window like I'm ready to record a YouTube video I just do that and it's like it is ready to go and this tool is pretty nice too because you know even if you don't want to just move it to position if you start just like resizing the window a bad example here this is one weird visual like issue with the Microsoft terminal the text gets really crazy when you move it but if you look at that bottom right there you can see that the position and the size of the window gets updated based on that little tool tip from sizer and hopefully they fix this issue because it looks a little bit silly trying to resize that window you know fortunately I don't really do that very much on video so you know that's really the only weird visual thing I've seen happen with the terminal that I don't like but it's not like a deal-breaker at all so going back to this list here let's take a look at some other programs that I have you know I mentioned I use Chrome and Firefox I use Google Hangouts and zoom to basically do like client calls because they do a lot of freelance work momentum is a really cool Chrome extension and it also there is one for Firefox as well Windows key W you can see this background image is pretty nice like every couple hours you get a different one you know it shows you the time like good evening and then you can put like a to-do items here if you want I'm not gonna sleep just yet because it's only 6:20 p.m. but you get the idea I kind of like that it's like a morale booster and it's free and it's nice so why not then for things like IRC I like to use hex chat which is if you're wondering what this orange icon was that is this one over here not going to go too deep into this one but if you want to talk to other developers about topics you're interested in you know like docker and elixir and flask and other stuff I you know there's hundreds of people on here and just like an alternative to using slack maybe in my opinion I like it a lot better because yeah it's IRC been using it for a long time then you know as a developer also you know I guess I'll go over this one first I also use a command-line utility called pass to basically manage all of my passwords we'll go into this one in a little bit more detail when we take a look at my DAP files but what I was saying before was you as a developer you know besides developing you're probably doing things like listening to music right I do this all the time and I use foobar2000 so if I do Windows key M there it's going to open up fubar here it's a very very super lightweight mp3 player it has like shuffle and playlist and you can play things and you know it just the ballot volume and skip around it's super lightweight barely uses any CPU in memory you know I've been using this for ever since like the early 2000s it's like my favorite mp3 player you can see here yeah it uses like five Meg's of RAM great then for resizing images I'll close this too there's a program called orphan View that I find to be quite nice it's super lightweight there's not a lot of like boilerplate around the the image tool itself so you can basically you know preview your images like it's large they need to be and it's a very good for doing very quick like bulk actions like you know resizing a whole bunch of stuff or just resizing one image and you know foobar2000 also you know the link is right here so if you want to download it it's right there so let me start closing about some of these tabs so I don't get lost and yeah I mentioned I'm using mainly because you know if I eventually go native Linux it runs quite well over there and then if we're like financing and accounting I use canoe cache so you know I'm a freelance developer a sole proprietor I do courses on the side like you know it's very important for me to keep track of all of my finances so good new cache is an open source cross-platform like you know finance tracking and accounting system I like it a little bit better than Excel because yeah it's quite nice I can't really show that one on video because it contains like you know all sorts of like internal financial data that I don't want to share but yeah it's free you can download it check it out it's pretty nice the rest of this file really is like my hardware for all my other stuff I don't really want to go too deep into this one because you're probably not into like recording videos that much but mainly I use OBS to record my videos then Camtasia to edit them lately I've been using DaVinci Resolve to try to do some video editing but I'm getting some issues when it comes to mp4 exports like the audio is a little bit messed up so haven't been able to really switch to that although I do use DaVinci Resolve to edit all my podcasts in case you didn't know running in production comm running traduction comm is a podcast that I started like six months ago not going to go super deep into this one yeah basically I talk to people about how they run their web apps in production and I have a different guest on every time so I believe that is it when it comes to all the tools that I use on Windows so now let's go over to the Linux side of things where I have a whole bunch of stuff installed into wsl too so if you scroll down here in the dot files you'll see that there is quite a bit of documentation like quickly get set up with these staff files and I highly highly recommend that you do read all of this and very carefully go over it because in addition to being able to just like copy paste these commands into WSL - there are a couple of config files that you'll need to put on the windows side of things for example if I scroll up to the top here and we go into the C folder there is the WSL config and this config file is very very important at the time of making this video there is a bug with WSL - where it kind of just could potentially use 80% of your system's memory and it's not going to release that memory unless you've run some special commands but to basically get around that what you can do is you can just tell WSL - to be capped at a specific amount of memory in my case I'm using 6 gigs because I have 16 gigs on my system but you know if you have something like a gigs of ram you might want to set this to 4 gigs or even 3 then optionally also I just have the swap file that wsl to SVM creates to be on my regular hard drive instead of my SSD because I just don't want it to write to my SSD yeah this is a very important config file so you know definitely definitely read over these Doc's but with that said you know basically what you could do if you want to replicate this setup is you know copy paste this copy paste this copy paste this and then it's like you know as you move down the list here you can start may be installing certain things that you do want or you don't want like for example and I'll go over a couple more of these in a minute like I'm using the asdf version manager because I do install node and Ruby directly into WSL - you know that's mainly for my you know this podcast site here is a static website using Jekyll and that requires having Ruby and note installed and I just don't have those diced yet so this is a really nice way to manage your dependencies like for example you know you can install Ruby 2.71 and look at that I already see that I have a typo there that should be no js' not JD but I'd be a basic idea as you know you can copy paste this command and install it after installing asdf and you would have node installed in like two minutes so very very handy but again you know there's things down here that you might not want like I use ansible which is a configuration management tool to basically you know configure servers that you set up you know maybe you're not into that likewise I have like the AWS CLI and terraform and Tara forms a way to basically you know do what antipode us but for your actual infrastructure like setting up the actual server load balancers and manage databases and all sorts of great stuff like that I don't want to get too deep and it wasn't that because that's like way out of scope for this video but you know these are some of the tools that I have and FCF is another tool as well so if I hop back over to my terminal here we're inside of this flask application FTF is super handy because it lets me do things like this where you know let's say that I want to just open up my app that PI file I can just start typing app that PI and you know I don't even need to type in the full file name and it's just going to let me just quickly navigate to it and now you can do some other really really cool things too here like if I do a search for snake eyes it is going to search the entire project for that term and it kind of just shows like a little preview on the right here of that file like if I just wanted to jump straight to here then I can do that and there it is you know I have some videos about that on my channel as well so I'm not going to get too deep into that but it's more than just the vim plugin for example on the command line if you do ctrl R you can reverse search your history and FCF takes over this so you can just type in something like you know like DK docker compose up or whatever just like that like a fuzzy finder and that I can just run that command this is very very handy I use this all the time so going back to the doc files over here I guess we can maybe go over some of these packages here for example I am installing them GDK because that gives us plus clipboard support with vim now even if you're not using them you still want to have clipboard support to where you can share things between WS l2 and your main window system without having to do anything special like you know run clip that exe to like pass things to and from that clipboard because that is one way to do it without going over the method we're gonna do now but instead what I'd like to do is I'd like to install this one tool VC xserve and the basic idea here is and by the way it's a free download I've been running it for years it is very good and it's an ex server that you can run on Windows and technically this will even allow you to run things like graphical apps inside of WSL too but for right now we're just going to be using it to get that clipboard access and it's very important by the way if you go up to my dad files inside of one of these folders here you know in that startup folder there is this config dot X launch file and if you take this file here you know go to the raw like this copy it and then save it over to this directory on your computer which will you know replace the NIC with your name then this is going to configure VC Xserve to work for basically clipboard sharing and it does basically everything you need to do you don't need to worry about configuring it yourself so I highly recommend to do that if you want to get clipboard sharing to work I don't want to go too deep into my dot files itself like vim configuration but there is some vim stuff that you want to configure if you want to actually have them write to that clipboard but you know I have other videos about that if you want to take a look like why as you know there's team bucks and some other stuff here as well like for example when it comes to H top if you're new to the Linux world you know H top is a utility that lets you basically see the health of your system right we can see CPU cores memory you know what processes are being run like you can you know sort them and kill them and do whatever you want you know this tool is very similar to where if you were to run something like ctrl shift escape on Windows you know you get this task manager we can kind of see like basic systems doubts about that like there's a process list and so on so you can do that from within the command line on any server using H so let's go over the command line tool called pass this is a very nice tool that you can manage your passwords from the command line and you're in full control what for how you have things set up for example I just copied my Nick JJ github password to my clipboard and that's going to expire in 45 seconds if I didn't do this - see here at the end it would have just echo to the screen now what's really cool about this tool is it's not limited to just passwords so if you have a couple of API keys that's like multi lines long you can save all of that to disk and everything gets encrypted and saved locally nothing is pushed to the cloud although you can always back up the file to Dropbox or something like that if you wanted to sync it to multiple devices now it would be a little bit too long here to go into detail about this tool and how to install it but if you do a google search for past Nick Jinnah Takas and you go to this one black post which I'll link in the description then if you follow this end to end then you'll be good to go basically this gives you like a little high level overview demo of how it works and you know where you can go to set up a GPT key pair and things like that so now let's go back to the dot files readme here and we'll just wrap things up by going over maybe like how these dot files work at a very high level right so the basic idea is you would get clone this directory to somewhere within WSL - maybe like the home directory in dot files and then you create all these different siblings and these are linking basically the file that exists in this dot files directory that you just cloned to like your home directory for the batch RC file and for the profile and for the you know vim RC and team-ups config and you know whatever else becomes of this repo in the future because maybe you know I'll add new stuff as time goes on but there is one really important thing here in the bash RC file that it almost forgot to go over so let me just go ahead and open this up in vim and we'll take a quick peek so down here we do have a couple of conditions for example if you're running wsl 2 then this is going to execute and if you're running wsl 1 then this is going to execute instead and these export display lines are very important to get that VC Xserve to work so without these lines here then you wouldn't be able to you know share your clipboard or even see graphical apps like your run through WSL - now I'm bringing that up because I know that everyone is going to completely replicate my dot files so in case you're running something like zsh or fish or a different shell you know you'll want to make sure to poke around my bash RC file to move these commands over to whatever config files those shells use and I think that's about it so if we go back to the readme file here again you know if you want to really step through this stuff on your own it's all here for you to go over for example like if you don't want these utilities then you can just like copy paste this command into vs code or notepad or whatever you know remove the commands from here and you are good to go I hope that really helps you set up windows to be a very productive development environment especially using WSL - I am very very happy with the setup I know that I mentioned that you know one day I would like to go a native Linux but it's really not because the window setup is horrible like I'm actually very productive with the setup very happy with it the reason why I would like to go native Linux is mainly for privacy like I kind of just don't like the idea that Microsoft feeds off my telemetry data even using the basic telemetry so that's the main reason why I would want to go native Linux but other than that yeah this is a pretty cool setup I'm very happy to use it if you have any questions about anything please let me know in the comments below I'll do my best to answer every single question also if you liked the video please give it a thumbs up because it really helps thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you on the next one

Channel: Nick Janetakis

Views: 170,228

Rating: 4.9024968 out of 5

Keywords: Windows 10, WSL, WSL 2, Ubuntu, Docker Desktop, Development Environment, Dev Tools, tmux, Vim, PowerToys

Id: idW-an99TAM

Length: 34min 22sec (2062 seconds)

Published: Sun May 31 2020