Re:The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCod...
by tom_ on Sunday January 17, 2021 @05:56PM
(#25816123)
For whatever it's worth, I've found the same thing: that the amount of effort required to use Emacs on Windows is minimal. Since Windows is non-POSIX, inevitably some things are different, but it doesn't take much to deal with this.
My .emacs.d folder (now 15 years old, and a bit of a monster, a whole git repo with thousands of lines of nonsense plus a pile of submodules) has no more than a few spot hacks for Windows vs POSIX vs macOS.
(The most annoying bit has probably been keeping on top of the font names! - but interestingly these are actually super easy to deal with on Windows. It's Unix that's the pain in the arse here.)
I use Emacs on Linux and Windows equally. I've used Emacs on Windows at work for a decade. Other than magit, there's virtually no difference in experience between the two platforms.[1] Of course, perhaps you use a different set of features than I do.
> Maintaining Emacs on windows takes considerable effort.
I install it on my work laptop every 2-3 years, and for the last 5 or so years, it's literally been "Download, unzip and run." Occasionally I have to make registry changes to get org-protocol to work. Even 10 years ago, it was still fairly simple - just a bit of extra work to get some GTK related stuff installed as well. But right now it couldn't be easier.[2]
And I don't even use WSL. This is native Windows.
[1] Of course, if your Emacs is calling out to tools like grep/find, etc, you'll have issues unless you install those tools. Although these days, it's not hard to configure it to use ripgrep and fd, which has excellent Windows support.
[2] And perhaps installing LaTeX if you want to export org files to PDF.