Use Mosh on Windows from the Command Prompt

guide.md

Hi all. After wanting true color support in Mosh (to use Brow.sh), I also wanted to integrate it more tightly with Windows. Since I reckon more people will be wanting to accomplish this, here is a guide.

1. Install Linux Subsystem for Windows if you haven't already (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10) (I use Ubuntu)
2. Make sure you can execute bash from a CMD prompt.
3. Go into the bash environment by executing bash ~ in CMD prompt
4. Install Mosh-dev (for up-to-date version) from https://launchpad.net/~keithw/+archive/ubuntu/mosh-dev by doing sudo add-apt-repository ppa:keithw/mosh-dev then sudo apt-get update
5. Create a new mosh.bat file on your Desktop with the following contents

@echo off
bash ~ -c "mosh %*"

This launches a Linux bash and passes all the arguments you passed to the batch file on to the mosh program there.

6. Place the mosh.bat file somewhere in your Path (I ended up making a C:\bin\ directory, putting it there and adding that to my path)

You should now be able to just open a CMD window and type mosh your.server.com and it should appear in the same window, as if it was running on Windows directly.

that's because mosh-client -c print nothing.

if you want to get ssh-agent working through WSL, you may also need to do something like this:

sudo apt install keychain
echo 'if ! [ "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ]; then eval `keychain --quiet --eval --agents ssh`; fi' >> ~/.bashrc

and then modify the batch script to read .bashrc at startup:

@echo off
REM bash does not read startup files if we're entering WSL for the first time
bash ~ -c ". ~/.profile; mosh %*"

if you have a password-protected ssh key, that allows you to add it once on login to windows instead of every time you run mosh.