Re: [h-e-w] HOME value for Portable Emacs

[Jason Rumney]

Henri Fischer wrote:
> My portable Emacs has "C:/Documents and 
> Settings/Administrator/Application Data/" as HOME. Since my USB is 
> used on different clients, I would like my portable Emacs to get 
> .emacs from one of its own folders. Is this possible? And if so, how?

Create a directory called site-lisp alongside your emacs directory. The 
hierarchy should look like this:

...../emacs/bin
...../emacs/lisp
.....    etc .....
...../site-lisp

It can also go inside the emacs directory, but it will make upgrading 
Emacs easier if you keep them separate.

In that directory create a file called site-start.el with the following 
contents:

;; Only if it looks like we're running on Windows
(if (and invocation-directory
    (eq (string-match "[a-zA-Z]:" invocation-directory) 0))
   (let ((drive (substring invocation-directory 0 1)))
     (setenv "HOME" (concat drive ":/home"))))

If that doesn't work, you may need to set user-init-file back to 
"~/.emacs.d/init.el" or "~/.emacs" (either will work in current 
versions), as Emacs may have already worked out where the init file 
should be by this point.