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 have emacs24 and emacs25 on my machine. I want to use spacemacs with emacs24 and keep emacs25...well...as emacs. When I install spacemacs my ~/.emacs and ~/.emacs.d are changed. Both emacs start using spacemacs, which I do not want. Is there a way to have a spacemacs and an emacs at the same time. Tried looking for a solution and came across a solution to keep separate config files. But how to make emacs look for a specific config file. By the way if you still haven't guessed...I'm a noob.
At one level, this is quite easy to do. However, at another, there can be some
complications, depending on what you really want to do.
Emacs supports a command line switch -l to tell emacs where to find the config
file. So, from a very simple perspective, you could just create two wrapper
scripts my-spacemacs.sh and my-plainemacs.sh and inside them have the scripts
call emacs with a specific -l /path/to/config. You can pass $* to pick up other
command line arguments if you want.
The potential problem with this approach is that emacs will still use .emacs.d
to store all sorts of other information, including possibly elpa packages and
this could cause problems. To be safer, it is better to keep things completely
separate.
If you don't need to run both versions at the same time, the easy solution is to
have to separate directories, such as ~/.spacemacs-emacs.d and ~/plain-emacs.d
and then have a sym link called .emacs.d which points to whichever of the
versions you want to run. The two main problems with this approach is that you
need to reset the symbolic link whenever you want to change emacs flavors and
this won't work if you want to run both versions at the same time.
I guess we really need to know about your actual use case - why do you need two
different configurations? Knowing this could help identify a better approach.
As an example, I use org mode and babel to manage my emacs config. I have a
number of different versions and a simple script which I can run to generate
whichever init.el file I want from the different org files. I have a minimal.org
file, which has the most minimal emacs configuration I can bare and I have my
standard init.org which generates my working init.el and then I have an
experimental.org which is used to generate an init.el file which I use for
experimenting with new configurations or packages. It is trivial to switch
configurations, but I never need to run two different configurations at the same
time.
I often like to check out some of the other pre-cooked emacs setups, like
spacemacs, prelude, etc. for these, I just grab the current git version and use
a symbolic link to point .emacs.d at the root fo the git repo I want to
experiment with.
you can also use the following approach:
create a directory ~/spacemacs.
extract/copy the spacemacs .emacs.d into ~/spacemacs (so that it is ~/spacemacs/.emacs.d).
create a desktop link called Spacemacs (or menu entry) and enter the following command:
HOME=$HOME/spacemacs emacs
You can also start spacemacs from the shell with this command.
This way, you can run vanilla emacs and spacemacs simultaneously, each with its own configuration directory and elpa repository. The only disadvantage might be that you need to change a directory level upward to reach your real home directory, not the „fake” one set via the variable.
btw, this is how I run several emacs versions and configurations, as needed for diverse stuff.
The best solution seems to be using chemacs: https://github.com/plexus/chemacs
Sorry, I have a problem when I try to learn emacs in terminal, when I try to edit 1 file (file.txt) and I try to save this file with C-x C-s. I get 2 files with the same name (file.txt and file. txt~). how to handle duplicate file after save file with emacs on mac osx?
The ~-suffixed file is a backup copy of the file, with the state it had before you started editing.
You can disable such automatic backing up.
You can also control various aspects of such backing up, including where backup files are to be stored -- see the Emacs manual, node Backup and its subnodes.
You can also remove all of the backup files in a directory at once, by visiting the directory using Dired: C-x d. After visiting it, use ~ to mark all backup files for deletion, then x to delete them. See the Emacs manual, node Flagging Many Files.
I have my emacs.d folder located at:
C:\Users\<loggedin_user>\AppData\Roaming\.emacs.d
In this folder, I have my init.el file but it is not being picked up by emacs.
Is there another step I am missing, do I need to set an environment variable or something?
When I enter C-x d ~/ RET I end up at
C:\Users\<loggedin_user>\AppData\Roaming\
If I move the init.el file there, it is still not picked up. I have a deliberate error in the file that is not causing emacs to crash when it is opened.
Most likely you have an old ~/.emacs file somewhere else which Emacs ends up using in preference to the other one.
You probably want to check the value of user-init-file which will tell you which file Emacs ended up using as "the ~/.emacs file".
I suggest you report this as a bug, requesting that when several files are found as possible init file, Emacs should not just pick the first and ignore the others but should at least emit a warning about the fact that it ignored the others.
This is tricky on Windows 10 but I solved since I was suffering from same issue.
I created an Environment Variable called HOME with the path C:/user/<username> in the box "User variables for " create a new one
Just open with double click any file that is by default opened with Emacs and it will take few seconds to load then take changed on the init.el
create an init.el with just one line of code like:set-background-color "honeydew"
to test this, first before doing something more complex.
Hope That It Helps!
On Windows, Emacs is started with some Properties defined, found when you right-click the executable on your windows system. There you can define the
execution-directory, e.g. "C:\Users\loggedin_user\" (in parantheses)
where emacs executes
and looks for the .xemacs (.emacs) directory, where it find its init.el. (I had to create an .emacs File in my Windows Home Directory, which is defined in the Windows HOME Environment)
And where you can define the startup instructions (like (setenv "HOME" "c:/Users/Username/") ) etc.
If you configure that, the next time, emacs starts from the directory, you defined, with the initialisation-file
Windows 10 and Emacs 27.1 could not find .emacs.d: one more possibility, in my case %HOME% was set like HOME=%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%. This redirection seems not to work and emacs was using literally C:\Users\<loggedin_user>\%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH% for searching .emacs.d. I did not dare to edit %HOME% but created link:
C:\Users\username> cd %HOME%
You perhaps need to remove some files in C:\Users\<loggedin_user>\%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH% which emacs already created.
Create link:
C:\Users\<loggedin_user>\%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%> mklink /d .emacs.d ..\.emacs.d
I'm running Ubuntu and playing with Emacs for the first time but unfortunately it doesn't seem to see any sftp folders I currently have mounted. These folder are visible to nautilus and gedit.
Can any experienced emac users point me in the right direction?
I'm not sure how to get Emacs to pick up specifically those servers that have been mounted under Nautilus.
However (and hopefully this meets your needs), you can still view and edit remote files and directories using Tramp if you know the server name:
C-x C-f /sftp:username#server.net:path/to/file.txt RET
or
C-x C-f /sftp:username#server.net:path/to/directory/ RET
Tramp documentation
Although tramp is more efficient, you can "drag and drop" it from $HOME/.gvfs/server.net/ into emacs. $HOME/.gvfs/server.net/ is where it's mounted locally.
Typically I drop the file into scratch where (as you've seen) it's expanded to a filename. Just modify that into an evaluatable function, evaluate it with "C-M-x":
(find-file "/sftp:username#server.net:/path/to/file.txt")