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Comment by smaddox | Hacker News Reader

The linux filesystem has to be segregated from the windows filesystem. If I remember correctly, the linux FS can read from windows FS, but not write to it, due to locking issues. Or something like that. Whatever it was, it made me discount it as a way to write windows code. Instead, I'm using Git Bash, which is based on mingw

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I believe you got it inverted. You cannot write on the WSL file system from Windows, but the other way (writing on windows from bash) is ok.

How do they expect developers to write code if windows can't write to the file system? Do they expect everyone to use vim or other text based editor?

Just host the code in Windows-land.

Symlink ~/code to /mnt/c/Users/jamie/code, run whatever editor I want in windows to edit the code, and run my app from linux-land in the console. Hasn't given me a hiccup yet, even with a local sqlite database and such.

If you just treat your linux homedir as a spot for dotfiles and symlinks out to windows, it shouldn't give you much trouble unless you're doing stuff that relies heavily on owner/write permissions.

Or write it using whichever editor you'd prefer in Windows, then access it from WSL, I guess? You can see the entire Windows filesystem from inside the Linux environment. You just shouldn't try to write to the locations that they keep the Linux part of the filesystem in from Windows.

I'd use Emacs and the same X11 apps I'd use on a Linux cluster. There are X servers for Windows, though WSL strangely omits one.

If you like Windows apps, why run WSL?

Yes, because Windows doesn't play nice with Linux's permissions.

Which is weird because the Window's NFS server seems to manage it just fine.

You can definitely write to the windows file system from WSL, so long as you don't need admin privileges to do it. I use it at work and 99% of the files I edit are in a windows controlled drive.

For me, reading and writing works, but I have major performance issues on /mnt/. `git status` for example is unreasonably slow on any directory under /mnt/.

I tried to adapt to this by instead of writing to the Windows file system from Linux; to instead write to the Linux file system from Windows. After corrupting my profile 3x and having to reinstall WSL each time, I went back to vagrant[1].

[1] vagrant is also really slow on Windows.

When was the last time you tried? There are some file I/o improve EMTs over the past few months that drastically improved the kind of performance problem you are describing.

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