Enable WSL shell in GitHub Desktop

Alex M — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 05:23:18 +0000

Even though WSL shell support has been added to GitHub Desktop as far back as in 2019, the actual option is still missing from the shell list.

There are two ways to enable it:

1) Use GitHub Desktop Beta.

2) If you are using a stable version, you need to enable preview features. Set GITHUB_DESKTOP_PREVIEW_FEATURES environment variable to 1. You can do this in Windows PowerShell:

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("GITHUB_DESKTOP_PREVIEW_FEATURES", "1", "User")

Restart GitHub Desktop and you should now see WSL in the shell list.

Unpopular opinion: Volar is a buggy mess.

Alex M — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 16:35:30 +0000

I love Vue and the concept of SFCs - but SFCs have a downside of DX tooling around it, and there is only one de-facto tool for it - Volar.

I have used Volar since its inception when it succeeded Vetur and watched it grow over the years. Unfortunately, these were painful years not without some hair-pulling moments.

My biggest gripe with Volar's development was the amount of breaking changes between each release. Every time a VSCode extension would auto-update, something would break; even more so if you used any of the Volar plugins for .vue file formatting such as volar-plugins/prettier. While I was chasing the latest versions, I have personally filed many issues on GitHub, some of which have been fixed but ultimately it was eating into my development time and I could no longer afford to do that. I have since stopped auto-updating the extension or any of dependencies.

My current setup includes an extension and dependencies that are 7 months old, and it works as expected. There were so many major version updates since then, that I've recently tried to update to it - with a predicted result: it broke formatting. Back to my old versions I go.

DEV Community: Alex M

Enable WSL shell in GitHub Desktop

Unpopular opinion: Volar is a buggy mess.