22. April 2021

How to run Linux GUI application on Windows WSL2 with MobaXterm and Windows Terminal

MobaXterm is a great software that allows running applications from Linux on Windows in a nice integrated way without the need of installing extra XServer.

MobaXterm has also support for WSL2 which makes it easy to launch Linux GUI applications from Linux on Windows.

After installation of Linux distribution like Ubuntu or openSUSE on WSL2, you will find new sessions with the prefix WSL in MobaXterm. Simply click the session label and a new terminal will be automatically configured to talk to the local XServer.

Now you can start any GUI command, e.g. xeyes.

The same XServer from MobaXterm can be used also from other terminals and shells like Windows Terminal. It’s sufficient to export environment variable DISPLAY in the Linux WSL2 session:

export DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0.0
xeyes

Note: xeyes are part of x11-apps, you can install them by command

sudo apt install x11-apps

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20. January 2018

How to switch tabs in MobaXterm

MobaXterm is a versatile terminal manager for Windows. Many Windows users are using Putty to connect to SSH on a remote machine or Git Bash when they want to use Git on Windows. MobaXterm can effectively replace these tools with more convenient experience.

One neat feature of many terminal applications on Linux is support for tabs (e.g. in Konsole). The question is how you can switch between tabs in MobaXterm just by using a keyboard.

The Default configuration of keyboard shortcuts is stored under menu Settings and option Keyboard shortcuts.

By default you can use:

Previous tab - Ctrl + Alt + LEFT
Next tab - Ctrl + Alt + RIGHT

I recommend chinging the configuration to match default keyboard shortcuts of Firefox or Google Chrome.

Previous tab - Ctrl + Page_UP
Next tab - Ctrl + Page_DOWN

Enjoy tabs. :)

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