Is emacs works well with Windows?

Not "works well", but works okayish. Startup is slower. Scrolling (especially down) causes flashing redraws. Things like org-export that require external Unix tools are broken unless you install them. But it works and it's better than notepad...

I use [1] to get a very Unix-y experience on Windows; [1] even has `pdf-tools` for PDF viewing on Windows! I have the following saved in `emacs.bat`; set the path as-needed. rem To run on WindowsOS. rem Set the HOME directory to be one level up from the .emacs.d rem directory to match the Unix file structure. rem Use the -Q flag to open Emacs with no config loaded and go rem directly to the *scratch* buffer. set HOME=..\..\ ..\..\bin\emax64\bin\runemacs.exe --debug-init [1] https://github.com/m-parashar/emax64/releases

It's a long time ago I used Emacs on Windows, but it worked perfectly fine at that time.

Completely agreed on the Unix tools. Even `eshell` loses its mind when dealing with Windows `find`. The shell started behaving itself when I switched to running Emacs in cygwin. Unfortunately when in cygwin some modes get confused about path syntax which is a little different from both Windows and Unix. If your setup is pretty vanilla though I think cygwin is the best.

> Scrolling (especially down) causes flashing redraws. Fixed in emacs 29 > Emacs now supports double-buffering on MS-Windows to reduce display flicker.(This was supported on Free systems since Emacs 26.1.) https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/c77ef7d193cfba2e06846012abeb684e37d228a9/etc/NEWS#L2234-L2247

Good to know, thanks! Still on 28 because I didn't want to bother compiling...

To me Windows support was the thing that got me using Emacs. The joke is that Emacs is a bad text editor but a great OS.. and I needed a unified OS between Win, Linux and Mac. I was on Win7 at the time but wanted to use Unix tools like ls and pipes etc. Eshell implements enough of that stuff so the basics work. Because I really did not want to install Cygwin or whatever it is now. I can use Elisp to extend the editor if I want to hack up commands that call Powershell nonsense. Anyway, works great. Execute external program stuff works great, although you may find yourself fighting with which way the / or \ s go. *BUT* I was mostly using Emacs as a Markdown/PlantUML/Graphviz/very light coding editor, so YMMV.

thanks mate! thats the first time ive seen that repo. I think it needs a bit more awareness.

You're welcome! The great thing is that repo doesn't need Cygwin, WSL, etc. Took me a while to figure out that batch file, so I'm happy to share. (Also setting up PDF tools took some time; I'm happy to share my config for that too.)

The vanilla emacs experience is decent. If you factor in packages + your work PC antivirus it gets really slow/unusable for some use cases like magit

I use emacs on Windows at work. Okayish sums it up well. Everything is a bit slower, not having Unix tools limits functionality, magit is sensationally slow (this is more of a git on Windows thing than an emacs issue). Still better than any alternative.

For me Vim is better because more fast i think.

Doesn't a recent git update make magit (git) noticeably faster in windows?

Yes, it is.

It does, but I still sigh a breath of relief when I get back to my personal Linux machine at home.

It works well, but an even better experience may be Emacs on WSLv2: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

> not having Unix tools limits functionality I solve this by simply installing them on Windows. I've found I really only need `find`, `grep`, some compression programs and a spell checker.

From my 7 years experience with Emacs, many packages are broken (does not support Windows) or with bad UX. It sucks comparing to Emacs in Linux but better than Notpad in Windows. What do you say?