Windows WSL support

[poetaman]

This is a place to discuss how to make arttime work with all its bells and whistles on Windows WSL.

[Null-Sector]

Just curious on what's the easiest way to get it up and running on any Windows WSL and/or PowerShell. I'm using Windows Terminal.

[poetaman]

@Null-Sector I didn't know Kali Linux supported WSL. Their website seems to suggest 3 different modes for running WSL. Did you try it in a Linux terminal inside Linux's Desktop Environment. Or inside Windows's Desktop Environment with WSL access done via just a shell? You are welcome! Here's the link: https://www.kali.org/docs/wsl/win-kex/

[Null-Sector]

Oh yeah, it works pretty flawlessly [only know, if you do it, at first it's a hyper barebones Kali install and you have to manually install your pen testing tools and stuffs.] I've used KeX but yo that's a good point. I was using Kali in the Windows Terminal so yeah under Windows WSL directly. I should try it with KeX.

[poetaman]

"Oh yeah, it works pretty flawlessly". I guess you mean inside a Linux Desktop Environment of some Linux VM running on Windows.

[Null-Sector]

Well seeing as WSL has objectively better performance due to Hyper-V and me not needing most of a Linux GUI unless it's some weird Kali thing I gotta boot up KeX for. Yeah works really well for me and many other people lol.

[poetaman]

@Null-Sector From #53, it looks like arttime now works well under WSL with native Windows notifications and sounds. The dependencies are: zsh (>=5.7), wsl-notify-send, and less. Can you please pull the main branch, cd to arttime repo, and try ./bin/arttime or TERM=xterm-256color ./bin/arttime after installing the dependencies? If it doesn't work, or you have some issues, feel free to drop a comment here or open a new issue.

[panki27]

I've just tried arttime on my WSL2 running Debian 11 inside Microsoft Terminal.
On a glance, it seems to work mostly fine, but it returns 2 errors on starting:

echoti:539: no such terminfo capability: rmam
echoti:541: no such terminfo capability: smam

I haven't tested the goal stuff yet.
And I can't get the tarot cards to show up whitout missing symbols (🭸), no matter which font I pick in MS Terminal (even C64 Pro Mono doesn't show them). Any ideas?

[wychwitch]

@poetaman

@wychwitch The change needed would be simple. Here are some experiments needed:

There is a Linux command notify-send clone for WSL here: wsl-notify-send, and a related article. The first thing to do is check if that really works. Also, does it make some default sound? Please try the following commands, and post a screenshot of notification.

This is so funny, I had installed wsl-notify-send a few days ago!!

# First add notify-send function to bash or zsh as described on README.md of wsl-notify-send
notify-send -u critical "ARTTIME" "Sat May 06, 2023 12:16:55AM PDT\rgoal: 1m\rart: buttefly\rID: 23342"
# Try it without the wrapper too
wsl-notify-send.exe --category $WSL_DISTRO_NAME -u critical "ARTTIME" "Sat May 06, 2023 12:16:55AM PDT\rgoal: 1m\rart: buttefly\rID: 23342"

Okay so a few things

By default that command doesn't work, when I run it (either as the notify-send function or the straight .exe) it just spits the help command at me. I realize it's because of how "ARTTIME" is a separate string and its expecting only one

I adjusted it to the following so it replaces the WSL distro text with ARTTIME instead, also removed the urgency since WSL ignores it anyways

wsl-notify-send.exe --category "ARTTIME" "Sat May 06, 2023 12:16:55AM PDT\rgoal: 1m\rart: buttefly\rID: 23342"

However, it doesn't display the newlines correctly:

Replacing them with \n's instead of \r doesn't fix it either. However it does work! The sound is the default windows notification sound too.

If that works, then the next step would be for arttime to detect it is running in WSL. Can you provide the output of these commands: $ uname, $ uname -a, uname -s, and uname -r?

uname & uname -s:
Linux
uname -a:
Linux <HOSTNAME> 5.15.90.1-microsoft-standard-WSL2 #1 SMP Fri Jan 27 02:56:13 UTC 2023 x86_64 GNU/Linux
uname -r (looks like the best one!)
5.15.90.1-microsoft-standard-WSL2

An alternative to wsl-notify-send is BurntToast. Though it's not necessary to test this if wsl-notify-send works. It requires powershell, so the question then would be... is powershell.exe available from Linux running under WSL by default or is it something one needs to install from AUR?

yes, powershell.exe is available (actually, anything in the windows path is available! I can launch explorer.exe to a specific folder or even open a file from WSL using a windows exe for example!)

It took a while but I finally got BurntToast to run from WLS, but I had to be a little hacky.

First I had to make a script (as I couldn't for the life find a way to do this otherwise) with the following:

New-BurntToastNotification -Text "Don't forget to smile!",'Your script ran successfully, celebrate!'

I then launch a new powershell window in the bg to run the command and quit:

powershell.exe Start-Process pwsh "$(wslpath -w .)\test.ps1"

Once all that's done, I get the notification!

I dunno how feasible it is to use BurntToast, but I wanted to try it out a bit anyways since it looks much more powerful.

zsh is pretty compatible with bash syntax for basic operations. But I can do the edits in a branch for you to test based on the results of experiments mentioned above.

I would appreciate that!! Only if you have time to ^^

Thanks for your willingness and offer to collaborate.

Of course!!!! I hope this was hopeful

[poetaman]

@wychwitch Looks great! I created an issue #53 that refers this testing. It would be good to follow up there as other contributors on this discussion might be receiving notifications they didn't expect. Time is relative. I would like this feature in, though might be some time before I get a chance. Have left you a followup test in that issue :)

[poetaman]

@panki27 From #53, it looks like arttime now works well under WSL with native Windows notifications and sounds. The dependencies are: zsh (>=5.7), wsl-notify-send, and less. Can you please pull the main branch, cd to arttime repo, and try TERM=xterm-256color ./bin/arttime after installing the dependencies? If it doesn't work, or you have some issues, feel free to drop a comment here or open a new issue.

[panki27]

@poetaman I got around to testing today. I set a goal 30s and got a Windows popup at the correct time 👍
Anything else you want me to try?

Now if only the Conpty issue were fixed already 😞

[poetaman]

@panki27 Thanks! Conpty issue affects only a known subset of art in arttime and it cannot do anything about that. arttime seems feature-complete for WSL. Maybe we just need to make more noise on the Microsoft GitHub page.