Description
A few WSL distributions in and your C drive starts complaining: virtual disks only grow, and deleting files inside never gives the space back. Moving a distribution to another drive officially means exporting it to a tar and importing it again, a string of flags that is easy to get wrong — and cloning one for testing means the same dance.
WSL Manager puts all of that behind a window. Move a distro, reclaim the holes inside its virtual disk, clone one as a sandbox, back the whole thing up to a file — each is a few clicks, and it calls the native wsl interface underneath so nothing is hidden. It also turns any Docker image into a WSL distribution without Docker installed, manages WSL on another machine over SSH, and ships an MCP server so an AI agent can drive your environment directly. On macOS it manages native Linux VMs instead.
Move and reclaim space: Relocate a distribution to another drive, or compact its virtual disk so deleted files actually return their space.
Clone and back up: Copy an environment as a test sandbox, or archive a whole distribution to a file and restore it on a new machine with software and config intact.
Docker images as distros: Turn any image into a login-able WSL instance without installing Docker, which makes prebuilt images usable as dev environments.
Configuration in the UI: systemd, mount options and the default user — the wsl.conf settings — are edited on screen rather than in a text file.
Remote and AI access: Manage WSL on another machine over SSH, and let an AI agent create instances, run commands and install packages through the built-in MCP server.
Quick launch: Open a terminal or VS Code straight into a chosen instance, and attach script tasks to it.
WSL Manager puts all of that behind a window. Move a distro, reclaim the holes inside its virtual disk, clone one as a sandbox, back the whole thing up to a file — each is a few clicks, and it calls the native wsl interface underneath so nothing is hidden. It also turns any Docker image into a WSL distribution without Docker installed, manages WSL on another machine over SSH, and ships an MCP server so an AI agent can drive your environment directly. On macOS it manages native Linux VMs instead.
Features
Move and reclaim space: Relocate a distribution to another drive, or compact its virtual disk so deleted files actually return their space.
Clone and back up: Copy an environment as a test sandbox, or archive a whole distribution to a file and restore it on a new machine with software and config intact.
Docker images as distros: Turn any image into a login-able WSL instance without installing Docker, which makes prebuilt images usable as dev environments.
Configuration in the UI: systemd, mount options and the default user — the wsl.conf settings — are edited on screen rather than in a text file.
Remote and AI access: Manage WSL on another machine over SSH, and let an AI agent create instances, run commands and install packages through the built-in MCP server.
Quick launch: Open a terminal or VS Code straight into a chosen instance, and attach script tasks to it.
