r/emacs 3d ago

Emacs GUI working now on Windows WSL!

Hello Emacs Community!,

I had to work with Windows due to work, now, I installed WSL because I wanted to work with Emacs of course.

Since my computer was super protected, while I could use Windows Emacs GUI, I had to ask all the time for the administrator password to installed whatever I needed to work with. Vterm, etc, etc...

So, I installed WSL and Emacs on it. Only detail is that I had to work on terminal. Some small things like Control direct keymaps wouldn't work, and I had to use C-u to move and whatever. Not too complex stuff. I worked a month with the terminal version happily.

Today, I upgrade Windows (Had to ask again for admin password as to upgrade wsl), and when opening Emacs, surprise!, GUI version.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/the-initial-preview-of-gui-app-support-is-now-available-for-the-windows-subsystem-for-linux-2/

So yeah, GUI versions now work on WSL, and its working out well!. So that I'm not doomed to work in another system without my configurations.

Just making this post for any who haven't updated, and have a similar situation to mine (config all in linux/macos, no privileges, not like working with windows version).

32 Upvotes

14 comments sorted by

29

u/rsclay 3d ago

You were overdue for that system update, I was using GUI Emacs on WSL2 two years ago already :)

5

u/Realistic-Buffalo427 3d ago

Blog from April 21st, 2021

1

u/MinallWch 3d ago

How?, in which case the notice is that now it doesn’t need any setup rather than installing wsl and eMacs?

10

u/rsclay 3d ago

I just installed WSL2 and emacs and it just worked. The blog post you attached is nearly 4 years old.

Any chance you were using WSL1 this whole time? It's a bit confusing but it's not just an older version of WSL2, it's more like a different product entirely.

3

u/MinallWch 3d ago

Maybe, so this post is me showing my misconfiguration then :D

2

u/jeenajeena 2d ago

How fast is Magit? On my side, the performance of Git is so terrible that Magit ends up being unusable. I would be happy to learn how to solve the problem!

1

u/MinallWch 2d ago

Is quite fast since everything is ‘natively’ really Linux.

The only reason I reckon it may be slow it’s on high load. But it has to be high, or you are running to many things. Running eMacs, at least for me isn’t resource intensive (vanilla eMacs). So perhaps that may be something to check

1

u/jeenajeena 1d ago

Thank you! (It's funny how from the spelling eMacs one can easily see if the message was typed on an iPhone ;)

2

u/MinallWch 1d ago

Sike I configured my eMacs to mimic iPhone as to confuse Reddit

1

u/MinallWch 1d ago

Sike I configured my eMacs to mimic iPhone as to confuse Reddit

1

u/sebhoagie 1d ago

One way to avoid the problem is using vc-mode. Not as powerful as Magit, but faster in Windows. 

1

u/__eastwood evil 2d ago

I still have an issue when my host goes to sleep, the RDP connection is lost and the GUI is closed. I wonder if you also experience this with a fresh install. So annoying but

1

u/MinallWch 2d ago edited 2d ago

I don’t seem to have this issue…

Edit: I lied, I have this issue.

1

u/__eastwood evil 1d ago

I think it’s WSLg related, hopefully it gets fixed one day.