This is the first of a series of posts in which we’ll explore all things command-line – from the origins of the command-line and the evolution of the terminal, to what we’re doing to overhaul and modernize the Windows Console & command-line in future Windows releases.

With the Windows Subsystem for Linux, we’ve always allowed you to treat your files as case sensitive, just like Linux does. In the past, if you had files whose name differed only by case, these files could not be accessed by Windows, because Windows applications treat the file system as case insensitive. A while ago, we introduced per-directory ca...

Last week, the WSL team attended Microsoft //Build 2018. We had a great time meeting many of you and answering questions at the command line booth. In case you missed it, you can watch out session, Set up a Windows Dev Environment that Feels Like $HOME, online on Channel9. In this post, we will summarize the NEW announcement we made during //Build....

Setting up a dev box should be easy and fast.  At BUILD 2018 we announced a collaboration with Chocolatey and Boxstarter.  The project founders discuss the collaboration in the following video. Improving Machine Setup Have you set up a new dev machine and found it was frustrating or time consuming?  It's important to have a repeatable, fast way...

For many years, Windows Notepad only supported text documents containing Windows End of Line (EOL) characters - Carriage Return (CR) & Line Feed (LF). This means that Notepad was unable to correctly display the contents of text files created in Unix, Linux and macOS. For example, here’s a screenshot of Notepad trying to display the contents of...

[2018-06-29: Important Note: As announced in the release notes for Windows 10 Insider build 17704, Sets and Tabs will NOT ship in the next mainstream release of Windows (codenamed RS5). Please read the first bullet under the heading "General changes, improvements, and fixes for PC" for more details.]   [2018-04-16: Updated to better reflect "Sets...

As of Windows 10 Insider build #17643, you can copy/paste text from/to Linux/WSL Consoles!!! We know that this is a feature MANY of you have been waiting for - our sincerest thanks for your patience & continued support while we untangled the Console's internals, allowing us to implement this feature. To ensure that we don't break any existing...

We are happy to announce that we have open sourced a WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) sample  for Linux distribution maintainers.  This sample allows distro maintainers to build WSL distro packages for the Microsoft Store and developers to create custom Linux distro packages for sideloading.  You can find the distro launcher repo on GitHub. This ...

The next Windows 10 update includes many new features for Command Line developers. In this post we'll review WSL, Hyper-V, new tools, and UWP Console applications coming to the Microsoft Store.  We want to thank everyone who tried these updates via the Insiders program and provided feedback.  We really appreciate hearing from you both when we get s...

We’re excited to announce that you can now download & install Debian GNU/Linux via the Windows Store! After we announced that you’d be able to install and run multiple distro’s side-by-side on WSL , we are happy to introduce another one of your favorite Linux distros to the Windows Store. As promised, we are expanding your ability to run multi...