After getting myself into far to many messes with using both powershell and wsl, I’m moving uninstalling all things windows and trying to only run work apps via the wsl ubunutu image. with that I stil use vscode for all my coding and having the terminal open for all comamnds that i need. To update it to use wsl is super easy via
Steps to update vscode default terminal
- open the terminal
- select the drop on the right hand side dropdown bar
- select “Select default shell”
This opens the command palette with the options you cna switch to
- select WSL bash
Common issues
I found that my default wsl image was docker when setting this up. So after completing the above I would then get an error saying
The terminal process "C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe" failed to launch (exit code: 1).
The fix is to update wsl and set the ubuntu image as your default wsl:
running the below will list out all your wsl images as well indicate which is your current default:
wslconfig.exe /l
run the below to update it to your preferred distribution:
wslconfig.exe /setdefault Ubuntu-18.04
confirm via running wslconfig again
You should now be able to open wsl from vscode