Learn Docker With My Newest Course

Dive into Docker takes you from "What is Docker?" to confidently applying Docker to your own projects. It's packed with best practices and examples. Start Learning Docker →

Updated on May 13, 2025 in #dev-environment

Switching VcXsrv for WSLg to Get Clipboard Sharing in WSL 2

switching-vcxsrv-for-wslg-to-get-clipboard-sharing-in-wsl-2.jpg

We'll go over everything you need to set up to get proper Linux clipboard support and bidirectionally share it with Windows.

Quick Jump:

The good news is WSLg likely works for you out of the box or close to it on both Windows 10 and 11. You can run wsl.exe --version from WSL and check for WSLg version: <VERSION>. Besides that, as long as guiApplications=false isn’t set in your Windows user’s .wslconfig file then you’re good to go with no additional set up.

You should be able to copy / paste text as long as your WSL Linux distro has xclip or another Linux clipboard tool installed. If you’re using Vim or Neovim you’ll also want to make sure clipboard is set to unnamedplus. This instructs Vim to use your system clipboard, it’s not related to WSLg.

Keep in mind if you’re using the Windows Terminal you can always use CTRL + SHIFT + c/v to copy / paste but that’s not really clipboard sharing. That’s just using a Windows app to handle copy pasting and it happens that app is running Linux tools in WSL. Proper clipboard sharing will let you yank something in Vim with its y mapping and let you paste it into Notepad in Windows and vice versa.

That level of sharing is very useful. It lets you copy paste from native Linux apps or pipe things from a script into your system’s clipboard. I do these things a lot.

# Clipboard Sharing Before WSLg with VcXsrv

Since about 2017 I’ve been using WSL and then WSL 2. Since then I always used VcXsrv to enable bidirectional clipboard sharing between Windows and WSL. VcXsrv is an open source Windows X server which supports clipboard sharing too.

I liked this approach because it means native Linux tools like Vim, Neovim, tmux and others didn’t have to be configured to use a specific clipboard tool for WSL 2. This let my dotfiles be compatible with all operating systems without dropping in if conditions.

The only thing I configured with Vim / Neovim was setting clipboard=unnamedplus,unnamed to use the system’s clipboard. This works on all operating systems and isn’t related to WSL.

# Why Switch?

VcXsrv wasn’t a problem but it did require quite a few steps to get working:

  • Installing VcXsrv
  • Configuring VcXsrv
  • Setting up VcXsrv to start up when Windows started
  • Configuring .wslconfig in Windows to disable guiApplications (WSLg)
  • Configuring your WSL distro to set the DISPLAY in your shell

Here’s the commit from my dotfiles to remove the above, although I didn’t set guiApplications in my public dotfiles, I did have it set locally.

That’s kind of a lot of steps. Technically you only had to do it once and you were set but still, if that can be avoided nowadays with WSLg it’s worth a shot.

Why Did I Wait So Long?

I knew WSLg could do this and I tried it when it was first available but it never worked for me on Windows 10. Clipboard sharing simply didn’t work.

Also, VcXsrv worked well for many years. It never skipped a beat.

But, while updating my dotfiles I took this as an opportunity to investigate if the landscape has changed so I tried WSLg out again.

Testing Things Out

After applying this commit and removing guiApplications=false in my Windows .wslconfig file, I ran wsl --shutdown from PowerShell, opened a new WSL instance and everything worked.

I also installed pacman -Syu xorg-xcalc and ran xcalc to test a graphical app and it worked.

# Is WSLg Better?

It depends. For running both X and Wayland apps with GPU support, sure. It’s nice.

For clipboard sharing, as of May 2025 I would say VcXsrv is better but WSLg is good enough. I made the trade off for simplicity of setting things up mainly so it’s easier for others to use my dotfiles if they want.

VcXsrv automatically handled Windows line endings when pasting into Linux apps. It converted CRLF into LF. That means you can paste into WSL with things like p in Vim and not worry about it. It “just worked”.

WSLg will add trailing ^M characters whenever there’s a line break when pasting from Windows. I opened an issue for it on GitHub. Thankfully you can always hit CTRL + SHIFT + v with the Microsoft Terminal because it handles converting line endings for you. It’s kind of annoying to have to think about this but hopefully this will get fixed over time.

Keep in mind the above problem is only when pasting from Windows into Linux. If you’re normally copy / pasting within Vim you can use y / p without issues.

The video below demo some of the above topics.

# Demo Video

Timestamps

  • 0:37 – Make sure WSLg is available and enabled
  • 1:55 – Switching from VcXsrv to WSLg
  • 2:53 – Bidirectional clipboard sharing demo
  • 4:31 – Uh oh, Windows line endings with WSLg
  • 5:41 – Is it a bug with WSLg?
  • 6:02 – Opening up a GUI app in Linux as a test

Did you get clipboard sharing to work with WSLg? Let me know below!

Never Miss a Tip, Trick or Tutorial

Like you, I'm super protective of my inbox, so don't worry about getting spammed. You can expect a few emails per year (at most), and you can 1-click unsubscribe at any time. See what else you'll get too.

Comments