Emacs on windows

Anyone that uses windows, would you mind sharing your experience with emacs running natively, not using a vm or wsl. Is there any significant performance differencece in comparison to that on a unix system. Expect auctex, haskell mode and markdown-mode + a theme i don't use any other packages, so i think there wouldnt be an issue package-wise. Any input on the subject is well appreciated!

Use emacs on windows daily and had no major problems. The ones I had were with aspell and mpd. With aspell the download wasn’t working for windows so I just used hunspell

That sounds great, thanks a lot for your input!

as far as you don't need to use unix tools like grep or find you are good. I think even these are solvable. Paths and line endings, character encoding differences come to my mind as potential problems.

Hmm in my configuration files i do not have something path specific and since there won't be cross-os editing of the files i think that it should be fine, tight? Again thanks for your input, if i had to use emacs on windows i would keep it on a minimal text editor level because it's really comfy to right in + the auctex package is too good.

You should do a write-up and share your configuration I think. I’ve been using Emacs on windows for the past three months and the experience has been horrible compared to MacOS 😒

The initial startup is a bit slower for me on windows than on Unix. don't remeber exact numbers but maybe 2-3 second difference? Nothing that bothers me and smth I probably could speed up if I wanted to. I notice some minor performance difference with auctex and compilation times, windows again being a bit slower but not enough to bother me. It was a bit more fiddly to get some things setup on windows (synctex and running multiple hunspell dictionaries r a couple I remember), how much of this has to do with windows and my prior inexperience with emacs I don't know. Other than that once it's up and running it's been a smooth experience so far :> (except that one time windows defender decided my init file was a trojan lol)

Startup time isn't really an issue since once you open emacs you usually leave it open. Sounds great actually, I'm acquainted with slow tex compile times, (mostly because of strawberry perl) while using vs code a few years back for latex. That's actually a pretty accurate Windows defender moment right there. Again thanks for all the auctex insight as well! Much appreciated.

Oh would you mind elaborating on the things that threw you off?

I have ripgrep for windows in my PATH and it works great

Annoyingly slow when accessing filesystem

Hmmm, that's what im dreading of.

I should rephrase that it feels annoying for me - it may be fine for you! The lag is there specifically when looking up files - there is always a bit of a delay between calling find-file and the list popping up. I'm sure there's other parts that are probably slower or faster but not enough that I can notice and be annoyed by.

Using emacs on windows, I used my config file that I had on linux and macos without any problem or modification. Didn’t remark any lag, just smooth experience

I only have had 2 real issues on windows 1. Initial setup of org-roam (this is now resolved) 2. I use Hyper key (remapped app key) and super key. On ubuntu i turned off all the super based keys but on windows many key combos cannot be turned of so binds like "s-a" , "s-s" super with numbers won't work.

Oh these probably shouldn't affects my workflow, thanks again for pointing them out!

I use emacs on windows when I want to access my remote org mode notes. Except for treemacs not working (probably due to python path and something I could probably fix if bothered) it's been alright, the startup is slower but I think that's just due to Windows feeling slower than Linux. I had to rewrite my tramp paths to use sshx but nothing else major.

I want to use pdf-tools but It doesn't compile. Besides on Doom, Deft was running fast, but suddenly now no Emacs distro can run Deft decently. I tried Doom, Centaur and Terror (heavily customized by me), but I can't run Deft as fast as before. All other things run as expected.

Getting external tools like the lsp bits... does that actually work on Windows? (Native windows, vs cygwin, vs ming32, vs wsl1, vs wsl2...) - I imagine actually installing them can be trouble as well, and identifying the build type (which flavor of windows build), but I iamgine it works if you sort out all that install pain. I would also bet it works pretty well if its an all cygwin install, so not so much build cross polination problems .. but I'd be curious to hear :)

I'll return with an update once I've tried it!

I remember having those issues when a domain joined system is not on the company network (work laptop at home). Stopping the NetLogon service fixed the issue. I even made a small tool back in the day so I could turn the service off more easily. Handy if you pin it to the taskbar: https://github.com/Ytrog/ControlNetlogon

I use it daily but am pretty vanilla. No problems.

I think I actually had pdf tools working a while back. There are two major problems on windows: anywhere when emacs relies on other unix tools you have to make it work manually, which is a pain in the ass (but usually still possible!) And the other problem is performance. Yes that is startup time, but I think it also effects main usability. Emacs is just slightly slower on windows. If you use magit you will notice this *immediately* because the effect is much more pronounced. It sucks and takes like an order of magnitude longer than on linux. Otherwise my experience is fine, but because of the speed issue I usually gravitate to linux anyway, or wsl. By the way, if you're on windows 11 you can use gui programs from wsl, so if you like you can use linux emacs on windows. Surprise surprise, it's much faster with magit! But wsl has slowdowns when accesing the files in windows again, so that's a tradeoff. Though it's in my experience still faster to use linux gui emacs with windows files than it is to use emacs natively on windows.

A major obstacle for me is that vterm doesn’t work on Windows. Otherwise I have managed to get doom emacs working quite well on Windows.

Been using it for years. Setting up external tools like grep is kind of fiddly, but doable. The main annoyance for me is that magit is noticeably slow, I presume because spawning and IPC on Windows is slow compared to macOS and Linux.

Same here

I'm in the same boat. Everything except terminal emulators are up to snuff.

WSLg has been backported to Windows 10, so you can now run GUI programs on Windows 10 too without installing a third party X server. It also makes starting Emacs a lot simpler, as it will just show up in your Start menu. This is quite new, I got the Windows update for this last week.

oow, very nice! thank you for telling me that, as I'm still on win10 for my pc after my experiences with win11. I'll try that out.

If you have the Windows update you can upgrade WSL running "wsl --update". If that works, then doing "wsl --version" should show a line with a WSLg version. I don't know exactly which update is needed, but I'm on Win10 build 19045.2364

As the other user commented, share specific gripes. I _started_ using Emacs on Windows, it takes a little bit of work but you can have an experience VERY similar to the Linux one.

You can always either use alternatives (ripgrep), install the GNU utils for Windows (via the ezwinports project), or use a pure Elisp solution. The last one in particular is probably more viable than ever, now that we have native compilation. I guess.

There are many ports of `grep`, `find` etc for Windows. I came to this thread expecting a lot of Windows bashing, and WSL recommendations, but I'm pleasantly surprised by the comments. I did eventually move to Linux and it's great and Windows is slower, insecure, etc. But I get the feeling most of the people that say "the only way to make Emacs usable is WSL" didn't even try to adjust to the Windows way of doing things, or give it like, 1 hour to get all the dependencies. RE: LSP, my experience with Python, Go, C# and Node has been mostly good.

As long as you aren't doing anything advanced in git, you can get a lot of mileage of the much simpler and limited vc-mode. Pushing, pulling, commits, a quick look at the log, all those work fine with vc-mode.

First issue comes when installing Emacs. The need for a bunch of package managers in order to get there. Then there’s just software that’s missing like notmuch, xeft, vterm etc. So fine, you don’t have to do mail, fast search or proper terminal emulation, but then there’s performance. I don’t really care much about startup time, but the difference on the same configuration, just a bunch of stuff ignored to work on Windows is staggering. It’s about 30~40x slower. Working with git using magit, used to be a joy. It now takes an eternity just to open magit. The most annoying bit, I believe I was able to solve yesterday by switching to tree-sitter for some modes though 🤞🏻, so there’s light in the end of the tunnel