An Emergency USB for When You’re Stuck on Windows

Gustavo A. Ballen has an interesting story about his journey to Linux and Emacs. Ballen is a PhD student in the biological sciences and although Emacs did not come naturally, he soon came to rely on it. He also became a dedicated Linux user both at his lab and at home. But during an internship and a few other occasions, he found that Linux machines weren’t available and he had to use Windows.

Most of us know how disorienting it can be to be dumped into an unfamiliar environment without access to our normal tools. After a few times of finding himself stuck in this situation, he decided to do something about it. Remembering that Emacs is often considered a mini-operating system, Ballen decided to build a USB with executable images of Emacs and his other tools for when he was working on Windows systems. Then he could take his familiar and comfortable environment with him.

Most of his post is a step-by-step go by for building such a USB image. The Emacs instance is going to have all the usual problems of Windows Emacs but Ballen says that the execution speed isn’t effected. This is probably a good solution when you’re a guest user of a Windows machine and solutions like virtualizing Emacs are not available.

If you’re in Ballen postition and find yourself occasionally using Windows machine that you can’t modify in any significant way, you should take a look at Ballen’s post and build your own emergency USB.

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