== EmacsW32 - Enhancements for Emacs W32 Users == /From the documentation:/ : EmacsW32 tries to make it easier for an MS Windows user to get used to Emacs. It consists of two parts: * ''EmacsW32'' is a collection of Emacs lisp modules and MS Windows programs. It can make the keyboard and other things in Emacs function more like they do usually in MS Windows programs. * ''EmacsW32 Install Wizard'' is what you use to install and setup EmacsW32 on MS Windows. They can also be used to install Emacs itself. Note that you can even easily build your own installation program. New installation packages based on the latest version of CVS Emacs is regularly uploaded. The date of the last upload is most often entered on CategoryWThirtyTwo but please see also the home page below. There is also a guide for building Emacs yourself from the developers CVS for Emacs, using MinGW. To make this really simple there is a cmd-script too to do that. For more information look at the '''home page: http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html'''. EmacsW32 was before called ''Emacs Setup Utilities for MS Windows'' (the wiki page was WThirtyTwoInstallationKit). ''Thanks to DrewAdams for pointing out the need for a name and better documentation and to all others that has encourage me in my work with this.'' LennartBorgman == Background: The Whys == I may be the only person on this planet who thinks that it is too difficult to begin using Emacs on MS Windows. However I did find some things unnecessarily difficult. At first there was no installation program of the type you normally get on MS Windows. To install Emacs you have to get some unpacking utilities that are not so easily found. (Or you can use some commercial utility program, but is not that a little bit against the mind of Emacs?) If you get past this trouble you find that some of the most commonly used keyboard keys for editing under MS Windows, like control-x and control-v, does not function at all in Emacs. And then you find that the menus do not seem to work unless you are using a mouse. Well, you are a keyboard user, for sure, otherwise you would not even think about the trouble of learning Emacs. So you are a bit disappointed about the menus. (Ok, after a while you may discover that you can use F10 to get to the menus.) Naturally you want to associate some files with Emacs to work confortably in MS Windows. You do and find that it takes a lot of time to start edit any file. Seems like Notepad is a better alternative since you just do not have time to do anyting in Emacs! If you happen to get over this and do some work in Emacs you soon discover that you have trouble printing. If you are lucky you can find some tips and get over it. But do not bet on it! I could not (until I wrote my own hack to do it). Then you may think you are ready, but you are not! Now you discover that you need some unix programs to do the job. After some search you may find some that seems to do work for you. Ready? Oh no! There are those small things called "line endings" ... - they are different on unix and w32. So you hope that the maintainers of these utilities tries to take care of this. Hope is a good thing, but you may find they do not care much about this. Some of them say that "it is not my fault, it is MS Windows that mess things up". Maybe, but it does not help you ;-) And still it is easy - now. I hope. Just try EmacsW32 and the prebuilt binaries for CVS Emacs. And read the documentation in EmacsW32 for how to get the unix tools you need. There are some problems with those, but it has actually improved. == Some Other Sites that Use or Recommend EmacsW32 == I built EmacsW32 in a way that I hoped would make it easy for other to use it. It is rather easy to make your own distribution package (but I am not aware of anyone that has done that yet) and it could also serve as just an easy installation. The following sites are among those that currently recommends or use EmacsW32: * http://www.math.unl.edu/~rdieter1/Software/Windows/ - Emacs repackaged in .MSI format. Uses Emacs 21.3 with EmacsW32. * http://www.tei-c.org/Software/tei-emacs/index.xml.ID=install - Text Encoding Initiative Consortium. Recommends EmacsW32 as an easy installation of Emacs 21.3. * http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Emacs/Easymacs/windows-install.php - Easymacs. Recommends EmacsW32 as an easy installation. (But apart from that currently does not recommend using other features in EmacsW32 because they maybe interferes with Easymacs. However the enhancements to the menus in the prebuilt CVS binaries and the possibility to use the windows keys as META probably does not interfere with Easymacs). == Suggestions and Comments about the Setup Utilities == Please enter enter your suggestions and comments on the setup utilities below. However if you find an Emacs or XEmacs bug then report this to the Emacs developers. Please see EmacsBugs or XEmacsBugs The best place to ask questions about %EmacsW32% or Emacs on MS Windows is probably the mailing list [http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-emacs-windows help-emacs-windows]. You can also put suggestion and comments about EmacsW32 below. === (enter your comments here!) === === Sharing .emacs file === For people interested, here the content for ##C:\.emacs## in to order to share both Emacs versions configuration files: ;; Bootstrap in %APPDATA% area (message (concat "Bootstrapping in " (getenv "APPDATA"))) (setenv "HOME" (getenv "APPDATA")) (load "~/.emacs") Off course, you have to check Emacs version in ##.emacs## in order to avoid odd behaviour in 21.3 or 22.x versions. I use a vanilla version not the w32 version, so I just configure emacsw32 only in 22.x version: (when (and (eq system-type 'windows-nt) (string= (substring emacs-version 0 3) "22.")) (setq pr-gs-command "c:\\gs\\gs8.51\\bin\\gswin32c.exe") (setq pr-gv-command "C:\\Program Files\\Ghostgum\\gsview\\gsview32.exe") (setq w32-print-menu-show-print nil) (setq w32-print-menu-show-ps-print nil) (setq htmlize-view-print-visible t) (setq emacsw32-style-frame-title t) (setq emacsw32-mode nil) ; Keep Emacs bindings (setq w32shell-cygwin-bin "C:\\cygwin\\bin") (setq w32shell-msys-bin "C:/msys/1.0/bin") (require 'emacsw32) (require 'w32-integ) (require 'w32shell) (w32shell-add-emacs) (w32shell-set-shell "msys") (require 'cmd-mode) (require 'w32-print)) The ##(eq system-type 'windows-nt)## is here because I use the same ##.emacs## on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and OSX. I barely know LISP so I apalogize if the style is bad. My english is not very good too. Sorry. -- LaurentBoulard == Resolved and Included == === Emacs binaries as a zip file === There has been some requests for unpatched Emacs binaries for w32 in a zip file. Due to this I have uploaded one such file to http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/DL/EmacsW32+Emacs/Emacs-from-CVS/unpatched/. It is much larger than the installer though it contains less (EmacsW32 is not included, ie there is no gnuclient etc). I realize that it may seem useful, but in fact I do not believe it is. If you take the unpatched version of Emacs+EmacsW32 and install just the Emacs part that is in effect the same as unzipping the Emacs file. There is also one little change to the Registry at [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Emacs+EmacsW32_is1]. (This is the entry in Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel.) Otherwise all that is happening is that the files for Emacs itself are unpacked. I understand that some of the worries about using the installer is that it is hard to know exactly what it does. I have tried to describe this in [http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32SetupUtilities.html EmacsW32 Installation Wizard]. See also CategoryWThirtyTwo for other possibilities to get precompiled binaries. === Want Emacs C sources === I got some requests to include the Emacs C sources in the installer. (The elisp sources are already there of course.) I do not want to do that because it makes the download a bit bigger. It is however easy to get the sources and arrange so that they will be opened when you want to look at them using the links in help. Just download the sources from my site and set the variable find-function-C-source-directory to the directory where you unpack the sources. === frame-title-format issue === I setq frame-title-format in my .emacs, but this was getting clobbered by the emacsw32-style-frame-title which seemed to be setting my frame-title-format to nil after my .emacs waas run. -- DamyanPepper [new] Thanks Damyan, this has been resolved now in EmacsW32. === Old .emacs files === I recommend placing a warning in your instructions about old .emacs files. When I installed, I had an old .emacs file in the ##C:/## directory that caused emacs to crash during the install procedure so that the install didn't complete. After I changed the name of this file, the installation when smoothly and I am happy with the result. --EdwinStearns [new:20060517:2006-05-17 14:16 UTC] I hit the problem too, wanting to keep both 21.3 and 22.0.50.1 on my 2k system. The symptom is "Error (initialization): User has no home directory" and no .emacs file loaded. A quick look at HOME env. var shows: (getenv "HOME") -> "Š,ûw" ==== Resolved in CVS Emacs ==== This problem has been solved in CVS Emacs from 2006-05-20. -- LennartBorgman ---- Related subjects: CategoryKeys CategoryPorts CategoryWThirtyTwo EmacsMacro EmacsNewbie PrintWithWebBrowser WThirtyTwoDotEmacs