#WSL and Terminal Split Pane

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queen haven
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is it possible to have WSL and Powershell side by side in one window.

molten valeBOT
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Hi @queen haven. I'm kapa.ai, your friendly support bot. I will try to answer your question by searching through the knowledge base. :wave:

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Yes, Warp supports split panes, and each pane is its own terminal session, so you can have different shells side by side in a single window. [Split panes]

On Windows, Warp supports both PowerShell and WSL shells. [Shells on Windows]

In practice:

  1. Open a tab using one shell (e.g., PowerShell or a WSL shell).
  2. Use Split Pane (e.g., CTRL-SHIFT-D on Windows or right‑click in the pane and choose a split direction) to create another pane. [Split panes]
  3. In the new pane, start the other shell (e.g., run wsl from PowerShell, or pwsh from WSL), or use the shell selector to choose it if available.

One limitation noted in the issues: when you split a pane, Warp currently uses your default shell for the new pane, not necessarily the same shell as the existing pane. [Split pane bug] So you may need to manually start the other shell in that new pane.

Note: you can ask me a follow up question by @ mentioning me again :speech_balloon:

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queen haven
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@molten vale that didn't work running pwsh when in wsl.

molten valeBOT
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Let me check the knowledge base for you again. One moment! :books:

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You’ve run into a real limitation, not just a setup issue.

From the available info:

  • Warp does support PowerShell and WSL as main shells on Windows, and you can choose your default shell in Settings → Features → Sessions → “Default shell for new sessions”. [Support pwsh; Windows shells]
  • Split panes currently always start the default shell, not “the same shell as the current pane,” which already makes mixed-shell layouts awkward. [Split pane bug]
  • pwsh is only supported as a main shell, not as a “warpified subshell” started inside another shell (like from WSL). When you run pwsh from another shell, it behaves like a raw terminal session without Warp features, and there have been various startup/warpification issues around that. [Support pwsh; Subshell limits; pwsh warpify note]

Because of this, there’s no reliable, fully supported way (per the docs/issues) to have one pane be a WSL shell and the other be a pwsh session that’s started from inside WSL and still get normal Warp behavior.

The best you can do with what’s documented is:

  1. Set your default shell to whichever you want to appear when you split (e.g., PowerShell). [Support pwsh; Split pane bug]
  2. Open a new tab or pane that uses the other shell as its main shell (via the shell selector / WSL session option), rather than starting pwsh from inside WSL.
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If you specifically need “WSL pane on the left, pwsh pane on the right in the same window,” the knowledge sources don’t describe a clean, supported workflow that guarantees that layout today; they only show that split panes are tied to the default shell and that pwsh as a subshell is limited. [Split pane bug; Subshell limits]

So your experience (pwsh not behaving as expected when run from WSL) is consistent with current limitations, not something you’re doing wrong.

Note: you can ask me a follow up question by @ mentioning me again :speech_balloon: