Doom Emacs Windows installation steps

steps.md

Native emacs on windows is super slow just use the wsl version

• install wsl
• install a version of ubuntu 24+
• install all emacs deps as per doom documentation
• launch vanilla emacs (it will launch in the terminal this is fine use C-x C-c to exit)
• exit and stop wsl
• clone doom repo
• delete ~/.emacs.d (won't work if you do not do this you need to do this to ensure you can use an x11 session)
• re-run doom install
• should now work
• Ensure you enable the daemon otherwise you will have 6/7second launch times systemctl enable --user emacs

Installing Doom Emacs on Windows

More guides:

• Installing Doom Emacs on Windows
• Emacs MS Windows Integration

Installing Emacs

The easiest way to install Emacs is by using Chocolatey:

$ choco install git emacs ripgrep fd llvm

Scoop will work too, but because Emacs is a GUI application you’ll need to enable the ‘extras’ Scoop bucket:

Verify that it is installed by running this in a terminal:

This is important too as it will create a .emacs.d folder in your root user directory which we will need soon.

$ emacs

A default Emacs window should open.

Create ENVS

[https://mywindowshub.com/how-to-edit-system-environment-variables-for-a-user-in-windows-10/](guide on creating ENVS in Windows)

1. Create a HOME system environment variable.

   Set it to C:\Users\USERNAME\, otherwise Emacs will treat C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming as your HOME, which will cause issues later.

2. Add C:\Users\USERNAME\.emacs.d\bin to your PATH.

   This way, you don’t have to type all of C:\Users\USERNAME\.emacs.d\bin\doom every time you need to run this script (and you’ll need to, often).

   A pre-existing PATH variable should already exist among your system variables. It contains a string of file paths separated by colons; pathA:pathB:pathC. Prepend the path to bin/doom to that string, like so: C:\Users\username\.emacs.d\bin:pathA:pathB:pathC

3. Restart your system so your new values for HOME and PATH take effect.

Installing Doom

Clone the Doom Emacs git repository. Run this command in Powershell:

$ git clone https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs.git .emacs.d

After this is done, you can run the doom emacs install script. Run this command in Powershell:

$powershell -noexit -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\.emacs.d\bin\doom install

Running

You should now be able to run Doom Emacs by just typing emacs in a terminal. You might notice that it may be slow to start and hang sometimes. This is because you are meant to use Emacs as a client/server application. Emacs comes with a server that you can run and then connect to with emacs clients. This makes it launch a lot faster.

Launch an emacs server by running:

$ emacs --daemon

Connect to it by running:

$ emacsclient -c

Making a taskbar shortcut

When you installed Emacs through Chocolatey, it created binaries for emacs, emacsclient, emacsclientw, and runemacs. emacsclientw is the one you want to use since it will create an emacs client in a new window. To make a shortcut to this to use on the taskbar:

Create Shortcut And Pin To Taskbar

Right click on your desktop and create a new shortcut set the target to

• "C:\tools\emacs\bin\emacsclientw.exe -c -a=" Include the quotes
• This will then launch an emacs client. If a server isn't running, it will start one and connect to it.

Automatically start Emacs server

To automatically start the emacs server whenever your computer restarts:

• Make a shortcut in the "C:\Users<USER>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup" directory
• The target will be "C:\tools\emacs\bin\runemacs.exe --daemon" do not include the quotes