Hour 2: Using Emacs in Microsoft Windows: What Is NT Emacs?

Sams Teach Yourself Emacs in 24 Hours

Hour 2: Using Emacs in Microsoft Windows

Sections in this Hour:
What Is NT Emacs?		How to Tell Which Computer You Are On
Needed Directories		Summary
Setting Up for Printing		Q&A
Things NT Emacs Does Not Do Well		Exercises

Hour 2
Using Emacs in Microsoft Windows

This hour is for users of NT Emacs on Microsoft's operating systems: Windows NT--including Windows 2000--Windows 95, and its successor, Windows 98. This hour covers acquiring and installing NT Emacs, some common problems, and where to go for help. If you don't use Emacs on Windows, you can skip this hour.

What Is NT Emacs?

NT Emacs is a port of GNU Emacs to Win32. Although Emacs runs on a great many operating systems, its native environment is UNIX. A port simply means taking the source code for Emacs on one operating system, moving it to another, and adjusting the source to reflect the differences between the old operating system and the new one.

Did I say "simply"? It isn't simple at all. To give one little example, the scrollbars operate quite differently on X Window (the GUI commonly found on UNIX) than on Windows. So the people who ported Emacs to Windows had to write code to handle those differences. Then, to maintain Emacs's portability, they folded those changes back into the source for Emacs, so that the source for Emacs will compile on any computer to which Emacs has been ported. The result is that, having learned Emacs on any one computer, you should be able to use it on any other computer it runs on. Not only that, but any elisp code you write on any one computer should run on any other computer that has Emacs running on it.

In case you are wondering, the scrollbars (and other widgets and GUI artifacts) operate as Windows scrollbars, not X scrollbars.

What Version Do I Need?

Because NT Emacs is a difficult port from UNIX, it depends on a small team of integrators to verify that each revision of Emacs also works correctly on Win32. Due to this difference, and the occasional rewrite of NT code, the latest version of NT Emacs can be behind the latest version of UNIX Emacs.

The exact version you run doesn't really matter all that much, unless you need some specific feature not found in earlier versions. Emacs, like most open source software, evolves gradually, rather than lurching from major version to major version like some commercial products. If you want crossplatform portability, try to keep the major version numbers the same, but don't worry too much about the minor version numbers. So you'll work on NT with 20.3.1, but if you have 20.4 or 20.5, you should not see too many differences.

Requirements

NT Emacs is known to run on NT version 3.51 SP 5 and up, and Windows 95 and up. A reasonable installation of NT Emacs should not unduly burden a machine with 32MB of memory and a 150Mhz Pentium processor. Chances are if you need the power of Emacs you are running other tools that require at least as powerful a machine.

You need about 30MB of disk space for the binary-only distribution and various add-ons, and at least 60MB during the initial unpacking process.

If you are on Windows NT, you need to have administrator privileges for the installation. Log out now and log in again as administrator if you don't already have administrator privileges.

Where to Get NT Emacs

The easiest place to get NT Emacs is the CD-ROM that comes with this book. It includes NT Emacs version 20.3.1. See Appendix A, "Installing Functions and Packages from the CD," for more information on installing Windows NT Emacs from the CD-ROM.

There is also a live filesystem on the CD-ROM. It runs on Win32 for Intel i386 or later processors. You can install that without taking up any room on your hard drives. However, it will be slow--because CD-ROM drives tend to be slower than hard drives--and hog your CD-ROM drive. So I would recommend the live version of NT Emacs for testing the waters. If you like NT Emacs, you can install the whole thing on your hard drive.

FAQs

The NT Emacs Web site at http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/ntemacs.html .is also the best place to go for questions and answers about NT Emacs.

A copy of the FAQ is included on the CD-ROM. You can load this into your Web browser and search it for useful topics. You can also use it as a jumping-off point for other NT Emacs-related Web sites. That should save you a lot of typing. However, do check the Internet copy from time to time. It will be more current that the CD-ROM copy.

The FAQ also has instructions on how to join the NT Emacs email list. You can meet other NT Emacs users and trade tips and solutions to problems.