Wsl on Neale Pickett

Emacs tramp, wsl2, and ssh

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I run emacs in Windows, and do all my development in wsl. Doing it this way means the laptop will go to sleep: running a graphical application in wsl seems to block suspend because it uses RDP.

I’ve got a cool wsl method for tramp, but it doesn’t let a remote ssh access any agents. If I’m editing code that lives in wsl, an I try to git push or git pull, it prompts for SSH credentials.

Using the Windows ssh-agent in wsl

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Since I’m using the Windows ssh-agent, I’d like to make that available to wsl things too.

You do that by listening on the ssl agent socket in Linux, and forwarding those to a proxy program in Windows, which contacts the agent.

In Windows

You need a program called npiperelay:

winget install albertony.npiperelay

Restart powershell and display your path to see where npiperelay got installed. You’ll need that path in the next step.

Tramp wsl method

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Emacs has a built-in thing called “tramp” that lets you open files over various transports like ssh, docker, and sudo.

It doesn’t have a built-in method to use wsl files, despite Microsoft Copilot insisting this exists.

Here’s how you can make it exist:

(use-package tramp
  :config
  ;; This uses a program called pipetty, from the colorized-logs package in Debian
  (add-to-list 'tramp-methods
               `("wsl"
                 (tramp-login-program "wsl.exe")
                 (tramp-login-args (("-d" "%h") ("--user" "%u") ("pipetty" "%l"))))

  ;; A version that uses the less-obscure script
  (add-to-list 'tramp-methods
               `("wsl-script"
                 (tramp-login-program "wsl.exe")
                 (tramp-login-args (("-d" "%h") ("--user" "%u") ("script" "-qc" "%l" "/dev/null"))))

This works exactly like you would expect. For instance, I can now open /wsl:Debian:/etc/profile.