wsl-tray: is WSL2 running, and how hard?
(rust, windows, open-source) 1 min read by Bartosz Pachołek
A tray icon that shows whether the WSL2 VM is on and how much CPU and memory it uses, and shuts it down in one click.
wsl-tray is a small Windows tray icon for WSL2. It sits next to the clock, like the keyboard-layout badge, and answers one question at a glance: is the WSL2 VM running, and how much of the machine is it using?
Reading the icon
Grey means the VM is off. Green, orange or red mean it is running: below 50%, 50 to 75%, or above 75%, by whichever of CPU or memory is higher. Percentages are relative to the whole machine, the same way Task Manager reports vmmemWSL. Hover for the numbers.
The menu
- Shut down WSL2 runs
wsl --shutdownafter asking for confirmation. - Refresh now re-reads the numbers without waiting for the next interval.
- Start with Windows adds or removes an entry under
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. - Settings... changes the two thresholds; they are stored per user under
HKCU\Software\IDCT\wsl-tray.
Which download
Version 1.3.0 comes in four builds: Windows 11 and Windows 10, each for x64 and ARM64. The variants differ only in the VM process they watch (vmmemWSL on Windows 11, vmmem on Windows 10). If the icon stays grey while WSL2 is running, take the other one.
It is written in Rust and released under the BSD 3-Clause license on GitHub.