Creative Coding: Setting Up on Windows – Jag Talon

The Canvas and WebGL workshop that I’m taking right now is taught using macOS, so the course assumes that I can access some Unix tools and commands in the dev environment. Since Windows isn’t built on top of BSD or Linux, I have to do a bit more work to get up and running.

Install Windows Subsystem for Linux

Windows Subsystem for Linux or WSL is the best way to get a Linux environment running on Windows. It’s a lightweight virtual machine that runs unmodified Linux binaries on top of Windows. It’s so fast that it doesn’t feel like I’m using a VM at all.

See how quickly WSL boots up. It’s magic.

There are two versions of WSL, so I made sure to get WSL 2 because it’s 2-5x faster when it comes to IO operations like git clone and npm install—commands that I’ll often be using!

Install Remote – WSL Extension on VSCode

The Remote – WSL extension on VSCode forces all the commands to run in the Linux VM. It makes sure that I’m interacting with Linux all the time while I’m in VSCode. So even though the editor is running on Windows, programs like Git or Node are all running in Linux.

VSCode with the Remote – WSL extension.

Bonus: Install Windows Terminal

I’m a fan of good-looking terminals, and the built-in terminal on macOS is beautiful. It looks modern, and it supports tabs and theme customization. The built-in Command Prompt on Windows, on the other hand, looks quite ancient.

Fortunately, Windows Terminal is available in the Microsoft Store, and it supports tabs, vertical splitting, and even emojis. I don’t know why this isn’t included in the OS in the first place!

Windows Terminal with vertical splitting.