home directory and .emacs file in Windows 7

Question

I installed emacs 23.3.1 in c:/emacs-23.3. Following the hints in this page, I updated the site-start.el to set HOME environment variable.

(setenv "HOME" "c:/users/USER/emacs")

And I made c:/users/USER/.emacs (like I did in unix/mac) to write the code for using slime, but it doesn't seem to start slime correctly.

Is this a correct way of setting emacs in Windows 7? Where do I put the .emacs file?

Answer 1

You need to set HOME in environment variables in Computer settings (if I remember correctly), or put init file to default directory (just start Emacs, and press C-x C-f ~/ to see what is actual directory). And as I remember, on Windows, init file could be called _emacs...

Answer 2

I am running emacs as a portable app and this works very well for me:

Create a batch file in the root of your emacs directory. For example, I created:

C:\Dropbox\PortableApps\emacs-24.3\run_emacs_portable.bat

Then, edit the file and put this text into it:

set HOME=.\
bin\runemacs.exe %*

Now, I just launch emacs via the run_emacs_portable.bat file and my HOME folder always points to my emacs installation folder.

The %* allows you to pass arguments to the .bat file and have them forwarded to the runemacs.exe