windowsNew Windows Terminal
8 months ago I was complaining about the state of the Windows terminal and how dated it felt after using a modern Linux distro or macOS. Well it turns out I wasn't the only one complaining as Microsoft have just announced the new Windows Terminal! This is a "proper" modern terminal with tabs, colours, transparency etc. and cat be used with any shells that you may have installed on Windows (such as the traditional cmd, PowerShell, WSL (like Ubuntu) and anything that may come in the future). I'm really excited about this - this will be another big step up in making developer's and sysadmin's lives easier.
Microsoft have really been hitting it out of the park lately with their dev tools and things like improved permissions in WSL and the upcoming WSL 2 release will only make it even better (even a few years ago I would never have believed that Microsoft would ship a Linux kernel with Windows!). It looks like 2019 will truly be the year of Linux on the Desktop :-)
Running Graphical Linux Apps with X410
Just a quick update as I've just discovered something that has made my life a bit easier - X410! This handy app (available in the Microsoft Store here) allows you to run most GUI apps from the Windows Subsystem for Linux, meaning if you were previously booting into Linux to run a particular graphical app the that's one last thing you have to reboot for! Highly recommended to make Windows more Linux friendly for those of you who are Linux refugees like me. To be honest the thing I seem to use it for the most is to run a "proper" terminal so I can have tabs, infinite scroll back and all those good things that I was missing when I moved over to the Dark Side - that alone is worth the NZ$14.50 price for me!
Read up on it at the developer's website and grab a copy from the Microsoft Store here if you like what you see.