Re: [h-e-w] Re: How to tell (windows) emacs which ftp.exe, ediff.exe, grep.exe... files to use

[David Starks-Browning]

On  2 Mar 03, Guy Worthington writes:
> Galen Boyer wrote:
> > address@hidden wrote:
> 
> > > Good afternoon, Would someone know and could please tell me, how
> > > to tell emacs where to find the ftp.exe, ediff.exe, grep.exe
> > > executables it needs to use to access remote files, execute diffs or
> > > grep commands?
> 
> > Do you understand the concept of an OS path, but you would like to know
> > how to do this exclusively in Emacs, or do you not understand PATH and
> > really just want that this is enabled?  (The explanation for these two
> > would be different)
> 
> Funny you should ask that question, I've never understood how to
> inherit the PATH environment variable from windows.  Eventually I just
> gave up trying to inherit common environment variables and I now just
> consider emacs as a completely independent shell (i.e. independent
> from the windows shell), and manually set all paths for executables
> that I want to operate from within emacs.

If you are happy with the same PATH in Cygwin and NT Emacs -- and you
don't want to use the Cygwin port of GNU Emacs -- then another
approach is to invoke "runemacs" from the Cygwin bash shell.  If you
have taken care with your PATH in Cygwin, it will work for NT Emacs,
and it will automatically be inherited and used by NT Emacs.  So you
don't need to do anything special in .emacs.

In that case, my advice is to put the bin directories for NT Emacs
(and JDK and ...) *before* your Cygwin path /bin (or /usr/bin).

If you've also invoked ssh-agent before invoking NT Emacs (via
runemacs in the bash shell), then tramp via OpenSSH should work too.
(Though tramp + cygwin-mount.el has problems, last I checked, in case
you use that.)

This technique is not (yet?) documented in the Cygwin FAQ, though.

Regards,
David
(Cygwin FAQ maintainer)