How to install emacs prelude on Windows

Question

I tried following the docs exactly:

git clone git://github.com/bbatsov/prelude.git C:\emacs24.5\prelude
ln -s C:\emacs24.5\prelude C:\Users\blokeley\AppData\Roaming\.emacs.d
cd C:\Users\blokeley\AppData\Roaming\.emacs.d

Then I tried copying C:\Users\blokeley\AppData\Roaming\.emacs.d\prelude\sample\prelude-modules.el to various places:

C:\Users\blokeley\AppData\Roaming\.emacs.d\prelude-modules.el
C:\Users\blokeley\AppData\Roaming\.emacs.d\prelude\prelude-modules.el
C:\Users\blokeley\AppData\Roaming\.emacs.d\prelude\installation\prelude-modules.el
C:\emacs24.5\prelude\prelude-modules.el

When I start emacs, it starts as though prelude was not there: I don't seem to get any indication that prelude has loaded correctly at all.

For example, M-x prelude- returns no matches. I uncommented the (require 'prelude-helm) but M-x helm- returns no matches.

How do I get prelude working?

Answer 1

Just guessing, but if your windows version of emacs does not understand "symbolic links" (those that you create with the ln command) then it wont find your init.el file. Instead of

ln -s C:\emacs24.5\prelude C:\Users\blokeley\AppData\Roaming\.emacs.d

try to copy "C:\emacs24.5\prelude" to "C:\Users\blokeley\AppData\Roaming".

Answer 2

Note that on my machine, the directory ~ expands to C:\Users\blokeley\AppData\Roaming

I strongly recommend that Windows users set the HOME environment variable to something like C:\Users\YOURNAME

I managed to install prelude by:

git clone git://github.com/bbatsov/prelude.git C:\emacs24.5\prelude
ln -s C:\emacs24.5\prelude C:\Users\blokeley\AppData\Roaming
mv C:\Users\blokeley\AppData\Roaming\prelude C:\Users\blokeley\AppData\Roaming\.emacs.d

Then started emacs, which failed due to no GnuTLS being installed, so I found this issue and followed this help page which fixed it. Basically, I installed GnuTLS from http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/ into my emacs/bin directory and all seems to be working.

I then tried to add my old .emacs file to C:\Users\blokeley\AppData\Roaming. However, this broke prelude completely, so I found that I should simply add my customisations to C:\Users\blokeley\AppData\Roaming\.emacs.d\personal\custom.el

I also wanted find and grep to work properly. Emacs needs the posix versions of these commands rather than the Windows versions. Luckily, I had GitHub Desktop already installed, which has them, so I added the following to my PATH environment variable before system32:

C:\Users\blokeley\AppData\Local\GitHub\PortableGit_c7e0cbde92ba565cb218a521411d0e854079a28c\usr\bin

The long code after PortableGit will be different in your case.

Happy days.