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.
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.
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!
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.
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:
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.
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).
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.
> 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).
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.