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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Anybody manage to make their Bash/WSL actually look good? I've got it just running in, what, cmd I guess? I don't know. Anyway it's fuckugly. I had to just set all the fonts to white on a black background because otherwise the returns from npm installs and git status and stuff would be unreadable deep blue.

Don't get me wrong, I love using it, but it doesn't beat the aesthetics of a terminal on a mac or a nicely configured ubuntu terminal.

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I use zsh with Hyper (https://hyper.is/) using "atom-dark" (https://www.npmjs.com/package/hyperterm-atom-dark) theme and it's quite decent sans the hideous text background colors:

http://i.imgur.com/l4Oi2up.png

Same here - it works great in Hyper and is really usable.

Woah it uses 250MB of space when installed, this really surprised me, even for a js app. I like the terminal though.

I use it with ConEmu and I like my colors... Everything is configurable.

http://i.imgur.com/BHDxdOJ.png

Nice! Was that hard to set up?

I had to test a couple of variations before being happy because the same colors are used in all types of terminal (I use regular cmd and Bash). Sometimes one color is great in one type of terminal but is clashing with another color, for a particular use case, in the other terminal!

http://i.imgur.com/9Dx79vq.png

(By the way, there is a color picker when you click a color)

>Sometimes one color is great in one type of terminal but is clashing with another color, for a particular use case, in the other terminal!

Fortunately there is an "app distinct" option in the settings. You can pick different color profiles for different programs.

I didn't know that, thanks!

Can you run things like nano & stop and navigate around with arrow keys?

Haven't tried that specifically but I've used tmux and vi quite successfully, including mouse support.

As long as you start ConEmu with "-run {bash}", everything works very well, yes.

Thanks, I had trouble with arrow keys working when I tried it a while back but I'll give it another go with the "-run {bash}" option. And the Mac autocorrected "htop" to stop.

ConEmu with Bash/WSL has not worked out for me. I came across way too many incompatibilities, and weird behaviour. Some of these are documented in (1). That said, ConEMU was never really designed to support UNIX/VT100 terminal environments from the start. Its more of a cmd.exe replacement.

Instead, I've got a pretty good setup using Xming (2), a native win32 X server implementation.

In Bash/WSL, I set the DISPLAY variable appropriately and launch my terminal emulator of choice, as well as Emacs.

This setup has worked out to be very fast and stable for me.

1. http://conemu.github.io/en/CygwinMsys.html 2. http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/

Ditto, although I find VcXsrv to be a bit faster than XMing. No scientific testing, though ;-)

I had some trouble too and tried some complicated setup with wslbridge and other stuff I don't even remember. But in the end I got it easily working by configuring this simple task in ConEmu (everything is working, including arrow keys):

%windir%\system32\bash.exe -c "cd ~ && bash"

If you want the nice Ubuntu icon, add this as task parameter:

-icon "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\lxss\bash.ico"

You can then use the ConEmu theme of your choice and the colors are far more readable than with the default console. See default theme for instance:

https://lut.im/fyFmIT9zwj/IjbmI5FsOHq2ik6z.png

They're going to need to change that window icon. When WSL meant Ubuntu it made sense. Now that it's becoming distro agnostic, it needs a more universal representation. Bring on the penguins.

That's a prerelease bug. It's being fixed :)

Since its 'bash on Windows' something modern and bash-ish would be lovely.

... Perhaps the icon should correlated directly with the distro that you're running?

I had a feeling this was the direction you were going in based on the ASCII logos in the screenshot. For the major distros this should work well, but a generic icon would still be handy for the smaller ones (assuming they can be used at all).

Maybe the bash logo:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=chakra&q=bash+logo&yeg=B&ia=images...

My current hack is to install an X client and forward a single gnome-terminal window. With a bit of scripting it's pretty seamless.

For all of X's warts, its networking protocol works just as intended for this kind of use case.

I wonder if it's going to be possible to do the same with Wayland.

The font rendering is great.

https://i.imgur.com/VVtLVfs.png

How'd you get that setup?

EDIT: ah just saw that you have your .bashrc in that image, thanks!

wsltty works alright. There's room for improvement for sure.

https://github.com/mintty/wsltty

That's what I use too. Looks great with Fira Code.

If you prefer not to install an external program (e.g. wsltty), this gist https://gist.github.com/P4/4245793 has some registry presets for prettifying the built in console.

This is what mine looks like: http://imgur.com/Qj0fysB

It's all about changing the color palette of the console window, which is kinda a pain, but well worth it.

I use tmux super heavily, so a nice .tmux conf pays off.

I wrote a simple console program to easily configure hundreds of different color schemes for your WSL terminal: https://commentout.net/wsl-colors.html

You can use Conemu, ConsoleZ or a number of other console applications for Windows with it.

As a network engineer it's almost useless to me, ping, traceroute, mtr etc don't work. Neither does ssh tunneling. No ssh server.

Still using Cygwin for those reasons.

> ping, traceroute, mtr etc don't work. Neither does ssh tunneling. No ssh server.

These things work, as long as you are not under a firewall. The problem is that currently it doesn't expose anything to whitelist if you do use a firewall, but hopefully they'll sort this out eventually.

Most of these problems have been fixed as of the January Creators Update for Windows 10.

SSH server is still iffy, because Windows 10 comes with an SSH server (not OpenSSH), which you'll have to disable. It was very weird to try to SSH into WSL and get a cmd.exe prompt.

Also, once you install opensshd with apt, the server is only active while its terminal window is open (since closing the terminal window kills the WSL init process).

Thanks... I had heard improvements were on the way, thought it was next release and not crestors.

Good tip on disabling Windows own ssh server too, sounds like I need to revisit this stuff see can I get it working again!

You can run it in another terminal than the standard cmd. I've got mine running through cmder (http://cmder.net/) which is just a preconfigured ConEmu (https://conemu.github.io/) with some additional stuff out of the box.

ConEmu's defaults are pretty ugly, too, but with some tweaking you can get a good UI out of it. As another tip, Alt+Enter will maximize ConEmu to full-screen without any window chrome at all.

It was a bit of a chicken and egg problem: there was no incentive to have a decent terminal since+because there was no decent shell+platform. IOW the command line was a rudimentary tool, an artefact from the past, not a central piece of the experience. PowerShell barely moved the dial, but now that there's a trend towards the Unix experience, that may very well bootstrap some more glorious CLI days on Windows, which may even benefit PowerShell in some way.

WSL running fish in mintty (https://mintty.github.io/)

Shell - http://imgur.com/CeotBpF Neovim - http://imgur.com/HI3u2mA

You can install xrdp and some lightweight DE like Xfce, and then just RDP into your Linux desktop. Here's Xfce (and its terminal) running inside an RDP session on Win10:

http://i.imgur.com/Z5mRLIs.png

I installed bash-it. Works well and most of the themes seem to work ok.

Try MobaXTerm ( http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ ). Also covers ssh (instead of putty) and has an X server.

You can run a Windows X server, then run whatever X-based programs (including terminals) you want on the Linux side and forward the display to the Windows X Server.

"Old" screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/luCEh2w.png

ConEmu

I managed to run it under cmder, and from there it all went nicely; installed fish and other stuff no issues.

I have the same issue. Thought I was missing something. Luminous green and dark blue. :(

This is the dialog box you want:

http://imgur.com/pwzwjZu

Lets you actually make things readable - even pretty if you care to.

I never understood that dialog. Like the first 4 radio buttons seem to indicate there are only 4 values you can change, but then there's like 15 colored boxes in a horizontal line under that? I don't get it.

The 16 colors are the color table - these are the actual colors you want to change.

The selected box (of the 16) has it's values displayed on the right. Change those numbers to change the color's value.

The radio buttons select which of the 16 colors is the "default" for that setting. So you probably want to leave "Screen background" on black (the first color table entry) and you'd likely want to move "Screen Text" to white, the 16th entry. The popup colors are only really relevant for cmd.exe.

Yes, we're aware that dialog is garbage. I hate it to death. It's high on the backlog.

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