I tried looking for the .emacs file for my Windows installation for Emacs, but I could not find it. Does it have the same filename under Windows as in Unix?
Do I have to create it myself? If so, under what specific directory does it go?
Copy and pasted from the Emacs FAQ, http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/:
Where do I put my init file?
On Windows, the .emacs file may be called _emacs for backward compatibility with DOS and FAT filesystems where filenames could not start with a dot. Some users prefer to continue using such a name, because Windows Explorer cannot create a file with a name starting with a dot, even though the filesystem and most other programs can handle it. In Emacs 22 and later, the init file may also be called .emacs.d/init.el. Many of the other files that are created by Lisp packages are now stored in the .emacs.d directory too, so this keeps all your Emacs related files in one place.
All the files mentioned above should go in your HOME directory. The HOME directory is determined by following the steps below:
If the environment variable HOME is set, use the directory it indicates.
If the registry entry HKCU\SOFTWARE\GNU\Emacs\HOME is set, use the directory it indicates.
If the registry entry HKLM\SOFTWARE\GNU\Emacs\HOME is set, use the directory it indicates. Not recommended, as it results in users sharing the same HOME directory.
If C:\.emacs exists, then use C:/. This is for backward compatibility, as previous versions defaulted to C:/ if HOME was not set.
Use the user's AppData directory, usually a directory called Application Data under the user's profile directory, the location of which varies according to Windows version and whether the computer is part of a domain.
Within Emacs, ~ at the beginning of a file name is expanded to your HOME directory, so you can always find your .emacs file with C-x C-f ~/.emacs.
There's further information at HOME and Startup Directories on MS-Windows.
It should be stored in the variable user-init-file. Use C-H v user-init-file RET to check. You can also open it directly by using M-x eval-expression RET (find-file user-init-file) RET
Open the file like this in Emacs for Windows:
C-x C-f ~/.emacs
More information in the Emacs Wiki
On my Vista box it's in C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Roaming\
Note that it may NOT be enough to just type Ctrl-x Ctrl-f ~/.emacs and create the file.
It may be that your Emacs application uses a different place to store your init file, and if so, then creating the file ~/.emacs simply creates a useless file which your Emacs application ignores.
Also, you may want to do more than just access the .emacs init file, but you may want to know where it is, i.e., its pathname.
To get at this there are two methods:
Easy way: type Ctrl + H V user-init-file Return
Slightly trickier way:
You can find out where your system is storing its own .emacs file by:
Click options and scroll down to "Set Default Font..."
Change the font setting and click okay
On the options menu, go down to "Save Options"
When the options are saved, the system saves its .emacs file,
and you can read the file path in the minibuffer at the bottom of the Emacs screen
In Windows 7 put your init.el file in C:\Users\user-name\AppData\Roaming\.emacs.d\, where user-name is your user/login folder.
Take care so your init.el file won't be named init.el.txt. This is something Windows does if you create your file with some editor like Notepad.
On versions of Emacs on Windows above 22, it seems to have moved to
~/.emacs.d/init.el
, ~ being the value of your environment variable HOME (see Control Panel → System → Advanced → Environment variables).
The file itself might not exist. In that case just create it.
You must create an emacs initialization file. One is not automatically created.
I had a similar issue and this answer tracks down what I did.
My issue was my ~/.emacs.el file was not loading. Strange because this has always worked for me.
This question/answer helped me but I had to put my init file in the %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\.emacs.d\init.el because this is apparently the default behavior on Windows.
To troubleshoot this, I ran the following in the emacs *scratch* buffer.
user-emacs-directory
"~/.emacs.d/"
When I saw user-emacs-directory was ~/.emacs.d, I simply moved my .emacs.el file to %USERPROFILE%\.emacs.d\init.el. But this still didn't work.
I continued with expand-file-name as shown below:
(expand-file-name user-emacs-directory)
"c:/Users/pats/AppData/Roaming/.emacs.d/"
Got to love how Windows works. (not) So I moved my emacs.el file to the %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\.emacs.d\init.el and this worked. The file was now being read. But I got other errors because my initialization file loaded other (personal emacs) files (in ~/myenv/emacs/*.el.
Warning (initialization): An error occurred while loading ‘c:/Users/pats/AppData/Roaming/.emacs.d/init.el’:
Hum... Seems like all my files ~/myenv/emacs/*.el would need to be moved in order for this to work but I didn't want to do that. Then I realized that because the HOME environment variable was not set, emacs was performing its default behavior.
SOLUTION
Once I set my windows HOME environment variable to %USERPROFILE% everything began to work like it has for the past 25 years. :-)
To set the HOME environment variable, I typed WindowsKey+"edit environment variables for your account" to open the Environment Variables dialog box, and entered HOME=%USERPROFILE%.
Now my emacs initialization file .emacs.el is is back to its rightful place $HOME/.emacs.el and not in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\.emacs.d\init.el
To be fair, if Windows had just one place to put files for user installed packages the solution of making HOME=%USERPROFILE\AppData\Roaming might be acceptable, but because some applications use %USERPROFILE%, some use %USERPROFILE\AppData\Roaming and others use %USERPROFILE\AppData\Local it just makes it difficult to know where to find your configuration files.
I prefer having everything in my %USERPROFILE% or $HOME directory.
Another similar question was here:
Emacs init.el file doesn't load
As kanja answered, the path to this file is stored in the user-init-file variable (or if no init file exists, the variable contains the default value for where to create it).
So regardless of which of the possible init file names you are using, and which directory it is in, you should be able to visit your init file with:
M-: (find-file user-init-file) RET
Or display its full path in the echo area with:
M-: (expand-file-name user-init-file) RET
On Emacs 23 and Windows 7 it only works if you set:
HKCU\SOFTWARE\GNU\Emacs\HOME
After Emacs 27.1, emacs has started respecting the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME. The init file or the init directory can now be found in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/emacs/init.el.
In Windows $XDG_CONFIG_HOME could translate to %LOCALAPPDATA%.
In any case you can use the following emacs variables to find out the location of the your initialization file by M-x eval-expression
user-init-file
or the emacs configuration directory
user-emacs-directory
I've found that Emacs 22 will occasionally open either "C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\.emacs", or just "C:\Documents and Settings\username\.emacs" on my XP machine. I haven't found an explanation for why it occasionally changes it's mind.
~ will always point to whatever the current instance of emacs thinks is HOME, but kanja's tip (C-h v user-init-file) will always tell you what ~/.emacs actually maps to.
On Windows 8.1, if Emacs is started from Windows Explorer, a shortcut or from cmd console it uses C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Roaming.emacs init file. When I start Emacs from PowerShell, Emacs looks for its init file in C:\Users\<USER> folder. The fix to this issue was to set the HOME user environment variable (Control Panel\System and Security\System->Advanced system settings->Advanced->Environment variables) to C:\Users\<USER>. After this change, no matter how I start Emacs, it uses the same init file (see the accepted answer of this question)
On Windows XP it's:
C:\Documents and Settings\yourusernamehere\Application Data\
There is a list of directories based on your Windows version and extra information:
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Windows-HOME.html
For WIndows7& Emacs26.3：
if HOME environment is set, then the .emacs file should be in that folder.
otherwise, it should be in c:\.
In both cases, if .emacs is not there, _emacs should be used.
This is because we cannot create .emacs file according to the windows file naming rules.(but we can download or copy it from somewhere else).
I'm trying to use Emacs for golang programming. I downloaded the go-mode package and installed it. My .emacs is:
(require 'go-mode)
When I'm opening *.go files, go-mode enables correctly. But I can't save any *.go files because when I'm trying to save *.go files I'm getting an error in the minibuffer that says
gofmtprogram not found.
Golang installed (version 1.3), gofmt works from terminal.
How can I solve this problem?
Thank you.
On OSX I'm usingthe following in .emacs/init.el
(use-package exec-path-from-shell
:ensure t
:init (exec-path-from-shell-initialize))
to insure that Emacs are using the correct path.
Make sure you have gofmt in your PATH. (echo $PATH) to check, if you can't run gofmt in your shell, it is likely that emacs won't as well.
gofmt on my setup is in $GOBIN/gofmt, but I think it can be as well be in one of the $GOPATH/bin.
If you have it in your path, chances are that you have an emacs configuration that sets the path. Change as needed.
If you installed via a packet manager, chances are that gofmt will be somewhere else. (I think brew puts it in /usr/local/bin)
Small tip when this happen and you really need to save: switch back to text-mode (M-x text-mode).
I'm new to Emacs. I recently got a dot-emacs configuration from GitHub. Cloned the repo in my home directory as .emacs.d
This is for setting up a clojure environment. When i open Emacs and enter
M-x nrepl-jack-in, the minibuf displays 'No Match'
What am I doing incorrectly? Thanks!
It's possible that nREPL isn't being loaded. Add the following to your init.el:
(autoload 'nrepl-jack-in "nrepl" nil t)
You should be able to run it now with M-x nrepl-jack-in.
If the command doesn't work you'll need to do some troubleshooting.
make sure that nREPL is actually installed. You'll need both the Emacs library and the nREPL server.
check for any errors during startup. Launch Emacs from the terminal using the --d flag:
emacs --d
You will get a backtrace if anything goes wrong during the startup.
verify that your init.el is actually being loaded. Add the following code to the end of your init.el and restart Emacs.
(message "---> LOADED")
This will show in your *Messages* buffer if everything is being loaded.
Edit:
Looks like your init.el isn't being loaded. Check your home folder for files called .emacs or .emacs.el, which might be getting loaded instead.
Otherwise it could still be a path issue. Open a terminal and make sure this is the file you expect:
less ~/.emacs.d/init.el
Normally I am able to use tramp just fine to edit files and browse through the remote file system through SSH. Though at seemingly random times I would lose the ability to browse remote folders in emacs.
I get the error message:
Wrong type argument: number-or-marker-p, //DIRED-OPTIONS//
I've tried doing a clean reinstall of emacs without any customizations and the error still happens.
Also sometimes the error happens after browsing 1 or 2 directories while other times I'm able to do five or six directories before the error will appear.
Edit:
I'm using Emacs 23.3 running on OS X 10.6.8
Edit 2:
While I'm still going through the tramp debug log A couple of other pieces of information.
After the error I'm still able to use tramp of open and save files, just not view directory listings.
It seems to happen only when I save to a directory that is version controlled using git.
In the debug log the directory contents are listed out but it is not being outputted to the user
The directory listing inside the debug log show ^M (I usually notice this in the emacs info bar when editing files that have been versioned in git) even when I try to access a non-version controlled directory
The message is useless by itself. You should try to obtain more traces on the tramp behavior in order to find where is the issue. See the Traces and Profiles Section of the TRAMP User Manual.
Sorry to not help more but with another release on another platform…
Update:
Put the following in your emacs file
(require 'tramp)
(setq tramp-verbose 10)
(setq tramp-debug-buffer t)
Then, use tramp. Now, You should have a *debug tramp/method hostname* buffer.
I found out that this happens when I enable:
(setq-default dired-omit-mode t)
But for now I don't know how to make it work with this mode
I'm running Emacs 22.3 in Windows. Earlier today I had gdb working within Emacs just fine. I was installing QT4 and during the installation it asked me to uninstall MSYS which I quickly clicked through not thinking about things. I think I had gdb installed with the MSYS package and Emacs was using that, but I'm not completely sure. Now when I run the following I get an error in the mini-buffer.
M-x gdb
"Searching for program: no such file or directory, gdb"
I tried to add the path "C:\cygwin\bin" to the Emacs load-path with this code but I still get the same error.
(message "Adding cygwin/bin to load path.")
(add-to-list 'load-path "c:/cygwin/bin")
Could someone tell me what I'm doing wrong?
Thanks.
probably adjust your system path to point it where you have gdb installed.
Try using /cygdrv/c/cygwin/bin