The best terminal emulator for Windows 10's Bash or how to run X applications

July 06, 2016

#windows

update as of 03/2017

As this article is by far the most popular on my site right now I feel that an update is necessary, as the landscape evolved a bit since the original publish date. Conemu started to support Bash on Windows properly now and this is what I settled on in the end. The article below is still relevant for the running X applications on Windows part though.

I've been playing a bit with GNU/kWindows a.k.a. Bash on Windows a.k.a Windows Subsystem for Linux (Beta). I was especially interested whether I can use my regular Linux dotfiles to recreate my working environment of zsh + tmux + vim. The biggest troubles I had were with the terminal emulator. While the default one, invoked by saying bash is much better than powershell or cmd.exe already - it lacks some things I've learned to rely on, like 256-colour palette support. Thus the search for the ultimate terminal emulator begun. I tried ConEmu, cmder and their spinoffs to no avail. Either the colours were lacking, or the emulator would swallow up certain strokes like the arrow keys. Then I thought - hey, I use terminator on Linux, maybe it would be possible to use it here as well. To my surprise the answer was - yes !

install Windows Subsystem for Linux
restart Windows
install VcXsrv
run VcXsrv
invoke the following from the bash console:

sudo apt-get install terminator
DISPLAY=:0 terminator -u

profit !

A tmux session filling the screen on Windows 10, split between a shell showing the output of ls -hal on a dotfiles checkout and a vim buffer list on the right, with the Windows taskbar along the bottom

The font rendering is not ideal and the borderless mode does not work, but hey, it is quite usable nonetheless ! It even has bidirectional clipboard sharing with Windows' windows, which is good. P.S. konsole and gnome-terminal do seem to have troubles launching (crashy-crashes there)