Re: [h-e-w] Emacs for Windows

[Alexander Shukaev]

> Hi Alexander,
>
> Did you give up on this project?
>
> It would have been well received.  Lennart Borgman once maintained a useful
> Windows installation; but he appears to have abandoned it.  One of its main
> virtues was that the GNU Utilities most commonly used by Emacs were included
> in the installation.  I have been using the straight GNU.org Windows distro;
> but it is a bit of hassle to install completely.

Hello David,

I'm sorry for not updating Emacs for Windows [1].  I've been quite
busy these months, first with finishing my Master's degree and then
with the birth of my son ;)
I will probably start renewing those builds as soon as time permits,
and if there is healthy interest of course.

You, however, have another and even better option from which you can
benefit imemdiately.  I've already announced on the list that in
addition to Emacs for Windows [1], I've created Emacs package for
MSYS2 [2] (shout out to Eli for helping me resolve some bugs and
issues with the build system).  Both, stable archive [3] and
bleeding-edge Git 'master' [4], are supported.  Their corresponding
names in the 'pacman' package manager (from MSYS2) are
'mingw-w64-i686-emacs' (32-bit) or 'mingw-w64-x86_64-emacs' (64-bit)
and 'mingw-w64-i686-emacs-git' (32-bit) and
'mingw-w64-x86_64-emacs-git' (64-bit) respectively.  Since, I myself
use MSYS2 on the daily basis, I also use my own
'mingw-w64-x86_64-emacs-git' package all the time:

$ pacman -Ss emacs
mingw32/mingw-w64-i686-emacs 24.5-2
    The extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display
editor (mingw-w64)
mingw32/mingw-w64-i686-emacs-git r121448.a314016-1 [installed]
    The extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display
editor (mingw-w64)
mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-emacs 24.5-2
    The extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display
editor (mingw-w64)
mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-emacs-git r121447.8a9ba4d-1 [installed]
    The extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display
editor (mingw-w64)

As you know, package manager with continuous update model (such as in
Arch Linux and in MSYS2, thanks to 'pacman') is >> than bundling
(Emacs for Windows) in terms of convenience and robustness.  Ideally,
I would like to popularize this variant of using Emacs among all the
Emacs users on Windows, as one does not only benefit from
bleeding-edge Emacs but also from the rest of Unix software goodies
that come with MSYS2.  For quick start with MSYS2, I would recommend
to see their corresponding wiki page [5].

[1] https://bitbucket.org/Alexander-Shukaev/emacs-for-windows
[2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2/
[3] https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages/tree/master/mingw-w64-emacs
[4] https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages/tree/master/mingw-w64-emacs-git
[5] http://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/MSYS2%20installation/

Regards,
Alexander