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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

I've been running windows (using WSL for most of my development) for a few months and overall I'm very happy with it. Every non-GUI linux program I want to run works just fine on WSL, with the sole exception of (beta software) Urbit.

I do miss Xmonad-like window management, but windows does have shortcut keys that do a good enough job. Emacs works perfectly well. And Anaconda (https://www.continuum.io/downloads ) is actually a good native windows distribution of Python and Julia.

Cortana + voice recognition is actually pretty cool, I'm looking forward to hacking on it when MS releases the dev kit.

So far, windows seems to be an acceptable Linux. I will probably stick with it for a while, assuming I don't run into any crazy new blockers.

(I've been on Linux exclusively since 2001 except for a brief attempt to use OS X around 2009. That experiment was less than successful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1786930#1787411 )

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Emacs has one flaw for me under WSL: the janky Windows console doesn't pass C-SPC. Meaning I have to bind set-mark-command to something else (like M-SPC), or download and use wsltty (fork of mintty).

But other than that Emacs is fine, and a lot of Linux stuff (Node, mongo, etc.) works great.

Who cares if Urbit doesn't work? :)

To be clear, I use one of the GUI versions of emacs for windows. C-spc works fine there.

I'd like to play with Urbit - Yarvin and his goals are interesting enough that I'm willing to spend a few hours playing around.

Would you mind elaborating on what emacs in particular you're using? I use and love emacs but unfortunately the times I've tried to use it on windows it's been extremely unresponsive.

Have you tried this one?

https://sourceforge.net/projects/emacsbinw64/files/release/

It's worked for me fairly well.

Indeed that's the one that I used. For some reason, even just moving the cursor around the buffer was extremely unresponsive, it would take seconds for it to register a cursor movement. I'll have to figure out if it's some package I'm using.

The "official" one:

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/download.html#windows

Woah I tried it again and it seems like it's working perfectly! It seems like the initial release for windows wasn't compiled with optimizations, so perhaps that's the issue I was observing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/598iot/on_windows_em...

For the record, we fixed C-Spc in emacs on the more recent builds :)

What do you use for colors/theme in emacs in WSL? I ran emacs with the default settings the other day and there was a lot of unreadable blue on black.

Once the latest build filters out to Windows Update, I will probably only invoke the Windows build of emacsclientw, but it would be nice to have something habitable in WSL on occasion.

I set TERM=vt100 and run it in stunning mono.

Nice :-)

That's much easier on the eyes. org-mode folding doesn't seem to like it, but it should be no problem sticking to Windows Emacs for that.

Every non-GUI linux program I want to run works just fine on WSL

Most gui programs seem to work ok as well, though you do need an X-server running on Windows (e.g. the one in MobaXTerm does the job)

Yep. Pulseaudio works similarly with enough poking and prodding.

I was able to do stuff like watch cat videos on youtube with sound at full speed (though presumably not hardware accelerated).

I'm pretty happy with it too. For the things that are implemented, it works better than MacOS did as a casual Unix for me. Mostly because I prefer the Ubuntu tools. I'm still using a genuine Linux box for real work though.

The big feature I'm missing is network file systems.

> Emacs works perfectly well

Do you use spacemacs by any chance? I tried emacs with WSL when the Anniversary Update was released and ran into this issue:

https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/639

I'll try it again when Creators Update is available and hope for the best.

Edit: NM, just saw below, after I posted this message that you're using the Windows emacs build.

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