Launch VS Code from WSL Bash

The Creators update did install the interop functionality. However, it seems you need to install realpath in WSL in order for the path to be recognized. I'm not sure why this is the case but running sudo apt-get install realpath fixed it for me!

EDIT: After updating to the Fall Creators Update launching VSCode from WSL works out of the box 🎉

You could always create an alias in the WSL Bash shell

alias code="/mnt/c/Program\ Files/Microsoft\ VS\ Code/Code.exe"

If you add this to your .bashrc or .zshrc file then it will always be available when you start a new instance of your environment.

WARNING: Do not change Linux files using Windows apps and tools

Update: The above is not relevant to version 1903 or newer.

With that out of the way, I recently experienced the exact same behavior. Turns out, in my noobish first whack at WSL with VS Code I also installed a native copy from apt which overwrote the Windows path.

So in WSL I removed it with something like this...

$ sudo apt remove code -y; sudo apt autoremove -y

Then confirmed the path was correct...

$ which code/mnt/c/Program Files/Microsoft VS Code/bin/code

Then relaunched WSL terminal and all was well in the wonderful world of coding once again. :)

Note: I suppose another option would be to fix the path in WSL, but without a GUI package installed it will just launch in the background and never appear anyway.