
Show HN: Rockhopper – Launch windows apps from bash on Windows 10 - jaegerpicker
I made a thing this afternoon. If you are using windows 10 and would like to open windows apps from the ubuntu bash shell normally you can&#x27;t do that. I wrote this app to (sorta) let you do that. It&#x27;s a two part app, first is a dotnet core webapi C# app that runs on your windows box. Next is a shell script that you put in your path on the ubuntu shell.<p>It&#x27;s called Rockhopper (named after a species of penguin, since you are hopping form Linux to windows with this app is just seemed like the right name :) ), and you invoke it like this:<p>rockhopper -c code -a C:\\\\Users\\\\shawn\\\\Documents\\\\file_to_edit.txt<p>That opens Visual Studio Code from windows with that file passed in. Couple of caveats, the windows app has to be launchable via the windows cmd prompt, currently only supports 1 argument to open and the pathing is touchy, and lastly this has absolutely 0 security built in. I plan of fixing all of that but would welcome anyone else&#x27;s contributions. Speaking of that it&#x27;s all open source and MIT licensed here:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jaegerpicker&#x2F;Rockhopper<p>Have fun and use github to report issues if you have them. Currently I don&#x27;t have a binary build up yet but I do have TFS doing CI so every push to master kicks off a build, I&#x27;ll publish them if more than just I use it at some point. It&#x27;s early but very much working.
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teh_klev
Looks like this provides an official solution:

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/commandline/wsl/interop](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/commandline/wsl/interop)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12748395#](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12748395#)

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wilun
You can also try:
[https://github.com/xilun/cbwin](https://github.com/xilun/cbwin) (I wrote
that)

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kyriakos
Good job there

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jaegerpicker
I'm thinking about converting the bash script to another scripting language as
it should make it easier for the script to add some convenient features. Like
auto escaping the path and providing more options to get info back from the
web service. Also likely I'll restrict the app to only allow posts from
localhost as a first pass in security land.

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ianlevesque
Those are some huge caveats but you're filling a real need. Keep it up!

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RayDonnelly
A better name might be hoop-jumper. If you want a POSIX shell and real
interoperability with Windows, I can recommend MSYS2 instead.

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divbit
I really like Msys2 and have used it extensively in the past (to some hilarity
when people have commented on some sh files running exe's etc) - but recently
I have been thinking, if msft really starts iterating and supporting their
bash tool, then hopefully it could become something similar without maybe some
of the weird dependency rabbit-holes that sometimes pop-up in msys2.

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jmkni
Nice work!

