WSL USB Manager: Windows GUI tool for WSL

[nickbeth]

Hey,
I've been using usbipd-win for the past year and I've been loving it so far; it has been crucially important for working on embedded systems on Windows, allowing me to avoid the horrendous STMicroelectronics official tooling and just use Linux and the stlink-org/stlink tools instead.

I've recently started learning Rust and wanted to build something with it, so why not make a GUI for usbipd-win, although one already exists?
The current GUI has 3 main issues in my opinion:

• Unnecessarily big: 190MB install size
• Slow to open: sometimes taking more than 10 seconds
• Unresponsive when in energy saving mode (CPU running at low clock speeds, works wonders for battery life)

I also needed an auto-attachment thing that persists reboots. It would start up when the user logs in, runs in the background and automatically attaches USB devices to WSL.

The GUI I'm presenting here fixes all of the above issue, being a 600KB executable that leverages the "old" Win32 API for fast startup times and responsiveness. It also has a native look & feel as an added bonus.
The UI is organized in a more user-friendly way, displaying all the available details of a given USB device on a panel on the right of the device list. I've also tried to keep the same separation as the usbipd list command, which shows separate lists for Connected and Persisted devices.
At the moment, only the basic operations are supported (bind/unbind/attach/detach). Auto-attach is not yet implemented, but it's coming soon™️. I wanted to get the basics to work first, before continuing with the auto-attach feature.

Here's the link to the repo: https://github.com/nickbeth/wsl-usb-manager

Update: Auto-attach has been implemented, it leverages the usbipd attach --auto-attach command, which means auto-attach profiles are reset every time the application is restarted. Getting auto-attach profiles to persist reboot is harder than one may think as there is no real way to uniquely identify devices across reboots and plug/unplug cycles, and I've also realized I didn't really need that feature to begin with.

[callimero]

Just want to say thanks! That's how a tool needs to be.

Carsten

[JPHutchins]

Wow, this looks great! I don't really have any issues with WSL USB Manager 5.3.0, but as someone who has been working on "packaging python into portable apps" lately, I understand all the pain that can be inflicted by developing native applications in Python! It's not going to get better... so better to switch to Rust 🦀.

[callimero]

Hmm? It is rust?