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How does Emacs (and most addons) run on Windows?

I'm tempted to try it out, but knowing the community is (righteously) Unix-fist I'm not so sure it's worth the trouble.




One of the lead maintainers (Eli Zaretskii) develops mostly on Windows IIRC. I think you'll be fine.


I've been using it for years on windows. Magit is much slower but still great. Some people run emacs inside wsl, and I've done that once or twice to try out unix-only modes, but they were never good enough to convince me to use them.

My life improved a lot when I switched to Doom emacs, which takes care of a lot of emacs stuff I don't know that well.


Magit is unusably slow on windows, I never tried it on Linux, but on windows its slow to the point of making it unusable

Part of Git appeal is speed, because it works locally, magit on windows take that away

I hope on Linux it is actually fast, otherwise I would not know how to explain its fame and reputation


I haven't used Windows since around Windows 7, and that would be probably the last time I used Emacs on Windows, so, obviously, not an up-to-day response.

Here's what I recall were the major pain points then:

* You need to choose between MSYS2 and "native" Windows binaries (add WSL today for more choices).

* The choice above will influence how you interact with various shells. Getting shell encoding right and filtering out escape sequences that don't render well in Emacs terminal emulator of choice was a headache.

* All interactions with filesystem are slower. If a mode depends on interaction with filesystem a lot, like Magit, you are going to have a bad time. At the time CEDET was still a thing, but on Windows it was absolutely unusable. (Very infrequently I need to look at wife's laptop which runs some more modern Windows, and that's usually because she has some problems with Git or other infra, and I installed Emacs there to make dealing with this stuff easier: Maigt is awfully slow there).

* I don't know if Tramp has any kind of support for the convoluted and bizarre Windows user permission management -- I never had enough time to figure that out. On Linux, if I need to edit files owned by root, I do C-x f /sudo::/..., but there doesn't seem to be anything like that for Windows.

* In general, you will be missing stuff that you could easily accomplish in Emacs by pressing "!" in Dired buffer -- because there's nothing / very little of useful stuff you can call on files. If you don't install emacs with other MSYS2 utilities, your search options in Dired will be bad (default Windows find), similarly bad is the find in files that normally relies on grep to work. Same situation with spellchecker which relies on an external program.

I'd still take it over something like VSCode, but I would have to invest a lot of effort into bringing it up to the possible / desired level of comfort. It's definitely not the best place to use Emacs. Luckily, today, I'm in the place where I can, for the most part, forget MS Windows exists.


I am trying to learn and use Emacs, but I am not an expert. Surprisingly, Emacs 29 runs very good on Windows. I am happy with eshell, dired, trying to use emacs more for some simple tasks. I am experimenting with sharing emacs init.el configuration via local git + symlinks between 3 machines: 2 Windows and 1 Linux. Package configuration is challenging; sometimes, it works on Windows but breaks on Linux. Only nyan-cat never caused any issues ;)


I own no windows machines but afaik it should run OK on windows. Emacs is a pretty good application platform that glosses over lots of OS inconsistencies. :)


I heard that some addons (like magit and vterm) run much worse on Windows than on Unix-like. That's my main concern. Maybe it's an outdated view tho.


The big issue here is that spawning processes is (was?) much slower on windows. There’s also wsl2 where I think Emacs will work fine.


I run it inside windows terminal on WSL2 and it's smooth as butter. Despite losing out on some GUI-specific features I think I prefer it.


Still is but it works pretty well under wsl.


From what I remember magit is only slow on WSL, when interacting with a repository that is not located in the Linux subsystem i.e. laying in the windows user directory. But that might be wrong or also depend on other factors.


Magit worked perfectly fine when I was using Emacs on Windows, but nowadays I run it with gWSL on the only windows machine I own.




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