Make use of a package manager with the entire chosen distribution library of packages available for you to install - For instance a lot of infosec tools usually run on Linux.(Though you may run into compatibility issues for some very specific use cases) Install and run classic Linux services on demand such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Apache+PHP.Install the Linux version of Docker, which is much faster and predictable than the current version intended for Windows.Run a fully featured zsh terminal with Ohmyzsh.WSL makes legacy solutions like Cygwin completely obsolete. The general performance of binaries is pretty much native, but all the IO system calls have to be translated first and depending on what you're doing the slowdown can be significant although overall I have to say it's quite impressive.

It's kind of a reverse Wine, if you will. This is possible through a recent feature called WSL which basically allows binaries compiled for Linux to run on Windows.

Git for Windows sets you up with bash but what if you want to use zsh or install packages as if you were really running Linux? If you installed the full package you should have immediate access to various GNU programs ported to Windows.įor the sake of completeness, let's quickly present another popular terminal emulator: Hyper - Electron-based so quite memory-hungry but with GPU acceleration, tons of options and pretty fast overall. It's simple, looks good, provides tabbed consoles and allows for splitting panels. There's a terminal emulator called Cmder that not only fits really well with Git for Windows but actually provides a package with Git for Windows in it (they call it the 'Full' version). One nice alternative command line comes with Git for Windows which not only comes with Git as you would expect, but also more GNU tools (including grep) and a bash environments It's true that Powershell offers a unified environment of powerful commandlets for all of your administrative tasks but sometimes you'd just rather have the likes of grep or sed available. Nowadays a command line SSH client can be installed as a feature in Windows, and before that there were versions of it compiled for Windows anyway. In the past your Windows SSH client of choice would probably have been Putty. We tend to work with the terminal a lot and some of our workstations run Windows.

Best terminal for wsl