Presentation
Emacs Modified for Windows is a 64-bit (x64) distribution of GNU Emacs 28.1 (released April 4, 2022) bundled with a few select packages for R developers and LaTeX users.
The additions to stock Emacs are the following:
- ESS 18.10.3snapshot;
- AUCTeX 13.1;
- markdown-mode.el 2.5;
- psvn.el r1573006, an interface for the version control system Subversion modified to include Andre Colomb’s and Koji Nakamaru’s combined patches to support Subversion >= 1.7;
- Hunspell 1.3.2-3, a spell checker well integrated with Emacs, and some popular dictionaries (see below for details);
- default.el and site-start.el, configuration files to make everything work.
The distribution is based on the official GNU release of Emacs with the optional dependency libraries that enable support for the following:
- displaying inline images of many types (PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, SVG);
- SSL/TLS secure network communications (HTTPS, IMAPS, etc.);
- HTML and XML parsing (necessary for the built-in EWW browser);
- built-in decompression of compressed text.
Latest release
Version 28.1-modified-2 (Release notes)
System requirements
This distribution requires a 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows.
If you are still running a 32-bit version of Windows you need to install the 32-bit build. The last such version of the distribution was 25.2-modified-2.
Installation
Start the installation wizard and follow the instructions on screen.
Images and preview-latex mode
This version of Emacs bundles the libraries needed to display images
in formats XPM, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF and SVG supported on Windows
since Emacs version 22.1. Among other things, this means that the
toolbar displays in color, that the ESS toolbar displays correctly and
that the preview-latex mode of
AUCTeX works to its full
extent. However, the latter requires to separately install
Ghostscript and to make sure that the file gswin32c.exe or
gswin64c.exe is in a folder along the PATH environment variable.
The previous comment also applies to the image conversion
tool ImageMagick that may be required
by Org. If you need the tool, install it and make sure its location is
along the PATH.
Spell checking and dictionaries
This distribution ships with Hunspell for spell checking inside Emacs, along with the following Libre Office dictionaries suitable for use with Hunspell: English (version 2022.07.01); French (version 5.7); German (version 2017.01.12); Spanish (version 2.5).
The default dictionary for Hunspell is American English.
Additional packages
If you want to install additional Emacs packages
(polymode comes to mind, here) through
the MELPA repository, add the following lines
to your .emacs configuration file:
(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives
'("melpa-stable" . "http://stable.melpa.org/packages/") t)
(package-initialize)
Unix applications
Emacs sometimes uses external applications that are standard on Unix but
not available on Windows (for example: diff, gzip). When needed,
install the applications from the
ezwinports project. To
make sure Emacs can find the applications, include the folder where they
are installed to the PATH environment variable. (With thanks to
Laurent Pantera for the hint.)