You can try emacs-pgtk package, cause WSLg relies on Wayland
I downloaded the source code for emacs and compiling it locally with the --with-pgtk flag. (And --with-native-compilation for better performance)
That made my life improve a lot.
You can also install pgtk emacs directly from snaps when under Ubuntu in wsl, if you prefer.
I get a warning when compiling emacs from source with the pgtk flag telling me about a known bug in my version of gtk that causes problems when opening and closing multiple emacs instances. Do you know anything about this? In particular would it be resolved by switching to the snap?
Yep that’s what finally caused me to switch to using Emacs on WSL2 (instead of the Windows build). Then you can also get rid of that ugly white border from WSLg.
any details on that white border stuff? pgtk didnt autofix it for me in the past and id love to not have it searing my eyes
Just run the native Windows binary of Emacs. It uses the native Windows font rendering APIs, so the text should end looking the same as it does in other Windows applications (assuming it’s the same font and size, of course). The Linux version that you’re running uses a completely different font renderer, so it will be very hard to make it match exactly.
I don’t know much about wsl but they probably want to develop on headless linux why still being able to use GUI Emacs.
That doesn’t make any sense. WSL is not a headless Linux.
It actually is, you can’t run a desktop enviroment with it for example but it does let you open linux gui apps to be used from windows.