EmacsWiki: Category W Thirty Two (original) (raw)
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Installation
Official Releases
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/download.html#windows
- Stable Releases:
- /Pretests (Emacs 29):/
- /Snapshot Builds (Emacs 30):/
Unofficial Releases
- RHO Emacs – https://gchristensen.github.io/rho-emacs/
- ρEmacs is a preconfigured distribution of GNU Emacs editor for Microsoft Windows. It offers some enhancements over the standard Emacs experience and targets several Windows-specific issues. Currently offering version 27.2.
- Responsive to problem reports. Issue with M-x grep in v1.0.2 turned around in a couple of hours.
- Unofficial Pretests – https://corwin.bru.st
- Precompiled binaries creating use the same process and build infrastructure as the Emacs binaries available from GNU FTP. Builds run following most commits to the emacs-29([1]) or master([2]) branches. There are also some (less frequently refreshed) binaries (in DLL form) for various treesitter grammers: [3]
- Responsive to problem reports. Issue with M-x grep in v1.0.2 turned around in a couple of hours.
- emax64 – https://github.com/m-parashar/emax64/releases/ (sourceforge link)
- Optimized 64-bit build of Emacs for Windows. Built on Windows 10.
- Was kept highly up to date with releases around once per month. Seems to have stalled at Emacs 27.1 2020-09-30
- Extensive library support including ImageMagick, Pdf-Tools, and GnuTLS.
- addpm modified to not create/update any registry HOME entries. It only creates shortcuts as it should.
- Emacs Modified for Windows --https://vigou3.gitlab.io/emacs-modified-windows/
- Stock Emacs with a few modifications for R users. Currently offering version 26.2
- Includes an installer, AUCTeX, ESS and image libraries.
- Emacs-w64 – http://emacsbinw64.sourceforge.net/
- As of August 2018, seems to be abandoned: latest snapshot is from 2015, latest release is 25.3.
- Unmodified source code very similar to GNU release, but compiled with optimization.
- Offers snapshots and pretests as well as full releases.
Installation Details
- MsWindowsInstallation – Installation guidelines
- EmacsPortableApp – Install to USB stick for portability.
- 7-zip is a fantastic free (GNU LGPL) open source program for extracting .tar.gz files.
- Build Emacs yourself - for those who demand the most customization.
Getting Started
Using Emacs on Windows comfortably will require some extra configuration steps.
- MsWindowsDotEmacs – About the .emacs (or _emacs) initialization file on MS-Windows
- EmacsMsWindowsIntegration – Open files with Emacs, create working shortcuts that play nicely with EmacsClient and more.
- WThirtyTwoServerMode – How to use Emacs server mode (i.e. emacsclient) on Windows.
- MsWindowsCustomize – overview of Emacs customization on Microsoft Windows.
- Context Menu – adds Emacs to the menu you see when right-clicking on files
- MsWindowsRegistry – using the MS-Windows Registry for customizing Emacs startup - font, window position, window size.
Detailed Usage Guides
Shell Integration
Use Dired in Windows and let Emacs open files using default Windows commands.
- Dired+ in Windows – open files from Dired using their Windows file associations
- DiredHtmlMoveLikeWThirtyTwo – a way to make dired behave like Windows Explorer with regard to moving HTML files (while moving or deleting foo.htm MS-Windows also includes the directory foo_files which contains associated images, css etc.)
- MsWindowsDiredContextMenu – display Explorer’s context menu
- WThirtyTwoFindDired – simple Windows-version of find-dired
- WThirtyTwoFindDiredWithUnixUtils – find-dired on win32 using “real” unix find
- WThirtyTwoShellExecute – execute any of the ‘Explorer verbs’ available for a file or directory.
- MsShellExecute – More variants to execute MS-Windows applications associated with file types.
- WThirtyTwoExecPredef – execute Start Menu shortcuts from Emacs
- WThirtyTwoFilePropertiesDialog – opens Windows “File Properties” dialog box for specified file or directory
- WThirtyTwoSendSysCommand – list of commands to use with
‘w32-send-sys-command’ - WThirtyTwoHardDrivesMenu – provides menu with all currently available local drives (useful in dired)
Tips and Tricks
- AutoHotKey – a free and open source scripting language for Windows that allows you to automate and customize almost anything on your PC
- Bookmark+ – open bookmarked files using their Windows file associations
- WThirtyTwoNetSend – send messages using the NT command net send
- WThirtyTwoSwitchToWindows – switch to a window by its name
- MsdnHelp – Get MSDN help right from Emacs.
- EdiffOnWThirtyTwo – using ediff in an MS-Windows environment
- WThirtyTwoFontifiedRegionToClipboard – like it says
- WThirtyTwoBrowseNetDrives – To browse the net drives!
- WThirtyTwoMsgBox – make emacs bring up a simple message box using vbscript
- W32 Utilities– elisp to parse Shortcut files (.lnk), and get links to StartMenu, Recent, Desktop, etc.
- WThirtyTwoTelnetPlink – Use Plink (the command-line interface to PuTTY) as an emacs telnet client.
- SshWithNTEmacs - Use cygwin SSH within Emacs
- CatagoryIntellimouse – Information about using an IntelliMouse with emacs
‘w32-toggle-lock-key’function (included in Emacs) – toggle ‘Caps Lock’, ‘Scroll Lock’ and ‘Num Lock’ keys from within elisp- WThirtyTwoMailtoRegistry – Registry keys to open mailto: links in an Emacs Buffer
- WThirtyTwoSendMAPI – Use MAPI to send mail from emacs *mail* buffers
- MakeSmartShortcuts – seeing is believing, try it out
- How I use Emacs on Windows – Useful article talking about Emacs setup, including the PATH and other tips (Non WSL/Cygwin).
- Reading PuTTY credentials triggers security alarms – how to disable it
MS applications
- MsOutlook – use Emacs as the editor for Microsoft Outlook
- VisEmacs – Use emacs as the text editor for VisualStudio
- IEViewSource – Use emacs as the Internet Explorer “View Source” application
- XKeymacs – use the Emacs keybindings everywhere
- PowerShell – run Windows Powershell as an inferior shell within Emacs.
Printing
- PrintWithWebBrowser
- See also the Ghostscript tip on PrintingFromEmacs.
- From the FAQ, printing under MS-Windows: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/faq6.html#printing - but this is not uptodate and all tips there does not work! There are only two ways to print from Emacs that always works on MS-Windows, and that are PrintWithWebBrowser and using Ghostscript/GSview. See also http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2006-05/msg01022.html
- From Explorer: PrintFromWindowsExplorer
- From Word (as straight text or converting to RTF): PrintUsingWord
Reading proprietary file formats
MS-Windows development
- MSVisualStudio – Dev Env Command Line builds
- CygWin – using Emacs with (or within) Cygwin
- MinGW – using GCC directly without the Cygwin library
- CmdMode – editing cmd and bat files
- SlnMode – open sln projects inside emacs
- VbDotNetMode - major mode for editing VB.NET code
- CSharpMode - major mode for editing C# code
- Powershell mode - mode for editing powershell code
- MS TFS - commands for checkout/checkin to TFS from emacs (via TF.exe)
- Using NTEmacs with Cygwin
Help
- Mailing list http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/help-emacs-windows/
- FAQ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/efaq-w32.html - describes itself as “rather obsolete”.