Running gummi (or other X applications) using WSL

Just some notes on how to get GUI applications running on Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Prerequisites

On windows install an X-Server (ex)VcXsrv. If you have a high resolution screen, right click on the link created on your desktop and go to properties. In the compatibility tab press the Override high DPI scaling behavior. Set “scaling performed by” to “application”.

In bash install gummi and latex.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gummi texlive-full

Download and place the following files in C:\Program Files\gummi.

I didn’t sign the files so you’re going to want to open and save the two batch files so that the Windows security features let you run them.

Try running the StartX script and allow X-Server in the Windows firewall.

How it Works

The way we’re going to open latex files is as follows:

1. We’re going to tell windows to open latex files with a batch script I wrote
2. The batch script will check if the X-Server is running. If not it will start the X-Server.
3. The batch script will then tell bash to start gummi, passing the location of the file