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Is there a way run Emacs from a USB drive? I am a Windows user and I would like to be able use it on any PC without an Emacs install.

Rob Kam
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Ray
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5 Answers5

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Yes, the "normal" Emacs distribution for Windows is precompiled and just runs without having to do any install. Just get one of the *.zip files from the usual place, unpack it onto a USB disk, and you can use it directly. (The actual binary is inside the "bin/" directory.)

The only thing you may want to do is set it up to look for ".emacs" always on the USB disk instead of on your hard drive; see 

 (info "(emacs) Windows HOME")

on how to do that.

ShreevatsaR
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  • -1: You don't address how to deal with changing drive letters. – SamB Sep 27 '10 at 18:52
  • @SamB: It is covered under "the only thing you may want to do" (where the "may" indicates it's also something one may not really care about), but feel free to add that information in an answer. – ShreevatsaR Sep 28 '10 at 03:47
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    I guess I meant you should have mentioned `%~d0` and/or `%~dp0`, which expand to the drive and directory which the containing batch file is on/in, respectively, as documented on [MS's website](http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/percent.mspx) (and partly in the output of `help call` under `cmd.exe`) and more explicitly at http://ss64.com/nt/syntax-args.html. – SamB Sep 29 '10 at 19:50
  • (info "(emacs) Windows HOME") did not help me too much (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Windows-HOME.html). Do you have more info about how to tell emacs to start with a specified .emacs file? This did not help either: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Initial-Options.html . I understand you can write a batch and change HOME before running. What if I don't want to change HOME? – Gauthier Oct 25 '10 at 09:53
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    Actually couldn't find the answer in the emacs docs but there is a guide here which helps [emacs on USB guide](http://pigpog.com/2007/10/22/portable-emacs-onna-stick/) – sayth Jul 14 '11 at 11:26
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You can read Emacs-related pages at PortableApps.com, and if they have not yet ported Emacs to their set of portable applications, then please ask them kindly to add Emacs to the list of text editors. With enough requests they will do this eventually.

link0ff
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There is a beta version of a Portable Apps version of emacs 23.2 here. Initial test works fine here.

ScoBe
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Create a directory in the root of your USB drive called home.

Create site-start.el in the site-lisp folder and then copy this and you are all set to go.

(defvar %~dp0 (substring data-directory 0 3))
(defvar usb-home-dir (concat %~dp0 "home/"))
(setenv "HOME" usb-home-dir)
U. Windl
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sayth
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  • Two questions: 1) Can you comment (in the elisp source) about `%~dp0`? 2) is `usb-home-dir` necessary as temporary variable? Or is all you really need setting `HOME`? If so, it could be a single elisp expression, I guess. – U. Windl Feb 06 '23 at 07:47
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I have ported emacs to portable apps format.

http://esnm.sourceforge.net/download.html