while on WSL bash, can you invoke window's gitk on current directory?

Question

Suppose you're working on WSL cli bash, then you want to use gitk of the Windows on that current working dir, can you do this?

Regards,

Answer 1

If you have Git for Windows installed, you can invoke gitk as gitk.exe directly from the WSL command line without needing to install any additional software.

The only caveat to this is that the Windows version of gitk doesn't understand WSL paths, only Windows ones. This means that you can only invoke gitk.exe from within your repository. In other words, if /mnt/c/Users/arvil/working/my-repo is a Git repo, the following work:

$ cd /mnt/c/Users/arvil/working/my-repo && gitk.exe
$ cd /mnt/c/Users/arvil/working/my-repo/src && gitk.exe

But invoking it from outside will not:

$ gitk.exe /mnt/c/Users/arvil/working/my-repo
$ cd /mnt/c/Users/arvil/another-repo && gitk.exe ../my-repo
$ cd /mnt/c/Users/arvil/working && gitk.exe my-repo  # even this fails!

Basically, if you need to pass a path to gitk, it won't work.

Answer 2

I came here because I wanted to do the same. Though, after I finally successfully started the gitk binary, it obviously failed to find the source code, as the Windows binary doesn't know the file locations on the WSL format. I.e. my files in WSL are on /mnt/c/git/foobar.

You can probably make some symlinks or apply some other smart tricks to make the directory structure the same, but instead I went the other route; installing an X server on Windows and installing and elf-64 version of gitk. There are several options, but this is my working configuration:

• installing VcXsrv from https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/
  • during installation, I selected to set the X server to 0
• start the XLaunch from Windows start menu
• from Ubuntu on WSL,
  • sudo apt install gitk
  • echo export DISPLAY=:0 >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc
  • cd /mnt/c/git/foobar && gitk --all