Windows officially has some way of dealing with this now either released or to be released soon. Don't use this repo anymore, use the official way instead.
Nasty, brute force way to FINALLY open explorer and vscode with correct context from WSL. Hooray?
...you're gonna have some bad times when you mess with linux files using windows tools, but what is linux without freedom of choices?! If you want a taste of this badness: make a new file using vscode or explorer inside your linux home directory. This file will be invisible to linux. But hey, you're a poweruser now! You live for this stuff! But seriously, don't create/delete/copy-into files from vscode or explorer. I've had no issues with editing/browsing/copying-out-of.
I personally have a kivy/python project that is already up and running, and it needs to build android binaries out of linux. I keep all my source in WSL and open vscode and edit from there. Works beautifully. I don't need multiple sym links or aliases, and I don't have to set anything else up to edit code from my WSL using vscode.
Or say you have files you want to copy from linux to windows using explorer and a GUI, that's a reasonable thing to do with my tools. Or even just clicking and browsing file structure. These are all things that I find incredibly annoying that these scripts help to mitigate.
Sadly, this uses python 3 at the moment. You need to install it with sudo apt install python3
(This shouldn't be necessary in the future, as the things in this repo can (theoretically) be done purely with bash scripting. I have a workinprogress.sh file here for people to help me out with finishing it, but that file can be ignored for now otherwise.)
In your WSL (Linux) distro:
cd
git clone https://github.com/andymule/wslwin.git
Browse to this location in windows (using the gross method you're exactly replacing with this repo) mine is here:
C:\Users\<myname>\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.UbuntuonWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\rootfs\home\<myname>\wslwin\
and right-click setWSLENV.ps1 and Run With Powershell (if you don't see this context, it's because you've changed default programs for opening ps1 files. you'll need to shift+right-click>"open powershell window here" and type ./setWSLENV.ps1)
If you're having trouble running this powershell file, you probably need to first set your computer to run powershell files by opening a powershell as admin and running Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned as defined by Microsoft here
This sets up the C:\ default linux installation location of your WSLENV environment variable so linux can see it and use it.
Now, in linux, browse into this repo (mine is ~/wslwin) and run sudo ./install.sh
You did it!
from ANYWHERE in linux:
explorer opens a windows explorer at your current location
vscode opens vscode in your current folder
vscode [filename] opens vscode file at that location, first creating the file in linux if it doesn't exist