Setting up an emacs environment in windows?

I am currently constrained to a windows dev box and I want to migrate my projects from eclipse to emacs.

What ar开发者_JAVA技巧e some good references on setting up an emacs dev environment for windows? Anything that could assist in migrating from eclipse as well would be appreciated.

If you're used to windows behaviors (e.g. ctrl-c is copy, etc.), a good (customized) version of emacs for windows is the 'EmacsW32' package.

If you're looking at migrating away from eclipse, I assume that you probably want java support. For this you will want to get the JDEE package, also. Unfortunately, it's non-trivial to deploy on windows, as it depends on other packages (and requires cygwin or msys (pseudo-unix environments for windows) in order to install).

You may also want to install additional modes to support e.g. SCM systems, etc. A good source of information for this is the EmacsWiki. There's a significant amount of material there about emacs on windows, although some of it is out of date....

Sure, just download a prebuilt version and use it.

For example, as I use R a lot with the wonderful Emacs ESS mode, the prebuilt version by Vincent Goulet is really useful as it contains Emacs, ESS, Auctex (for LaTeX) and more.

Other prebuilds exist for Cygwin, MinGW, or plain old Windows.

Eclipse is pretty good on Windows; I'm a big user of emacs but for Java development I spend most of my time in Eclipse.

Regarding general use of emacs on windows I highly recommend you install GnuWin32, as it is much faster than Cygwin and integrates very well. Also see my blog post on Visual Studio tricks in emacs and this one on tags.

I'll assume you are doing Java development for the most part and that you would prefer not to be using Windows. This is a situation I find myself in from time to time. My preferences are to use a Linux machine (virutal or real) in addition to the Windows machine. Emacs just works better in a real Unix environment. And then use both Emacs and Eclipse where each is stronger. Emacs for editing, mail, planning, "thinking" type stuff and Eclipse for debugging, refactoring, some error fixing. Fortunately both Emacs and Eclipse make it easy to use both simultaneously.

I generally use EmacsW32 on a new box - it's a good option at least initially. I'd also recommend checking out the emacs starter kits which hook up to ELPA (http://tromey.com/elpa/), which allows you to get a usable setup pretty quickly.

1. Install Cygwin.
2. In your .emacs, load these two files, in this order:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/download/cygwin-mount.el

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/download/setup-cygwin.el