VSCode with Imp

[samchouse]

How would I get VSCode to launch new terminals with Imp instead of just the vanilla shell?

[cerebrate]

Turns out you can do this with a modification of the technique used to do this under genie . It involves a little bit of a hack, but it's not that bad.

First, turn off automatically updating extensions in VS Code. (Not strictly necessary, but since you will need to patch a file every time the WSL extension updates, it's just easier.)

Second, go to the .vscode\extensions\ms-vscode-remote.remote-wsl-0.66.3\scripts directory under your Windows user profile. The version number after ms-vscode-remote.remote-wsl- will vary depending on which version of the WSL extension you have installed; you want whatever the latest one is.

In the scripts folder, there is one called wslServer.sh. Open it up, and after the #! line and copyright messages but before the rest of the script, insert the following:

if command -v imp > /dev/null; then
        loginctl session-status > /dev/null 2>&1 || exec imp -c "$0" "$@"
fi

Third, make sure you don't have any old instances of the VS Code server running in your WSL instance, as this change will only affect new ones.

And there you go!

[cerebrate]

Note: at the moment, running the Windows VS Code from inside WSL with code has an issue, due to a bottle-imp bug that will be fixed when 0.11 ships. Until then, you need to manually recreate the WSL_DISTRO_NAME variable with

export WSL_DISTRO_NAME=Debian

or insert-distro-name-here in order for VS Code to realize that it should be using the remote extension and not just opening the files via //wsl.localhost.

[cerebrate]

This is now fixed as promised in 0.11.