Moving Emacs From Windows To Linux

Emacs Elements has a video on how to move Emacs from Windows to Linux. That may seem a little nichey but Irreal feels duty bound to provide whatever assistance it can in helping people migrate off of Windows to a sensible system. Although the video is specifically about moving to Linux, the advice works equally well for macOS or any Unix system except, perhaps, for the package manager—brew, apt, etc—needed to install dependencies.

The basic advice is to move your entire .emacs.d directory to the new system and then tweak it to work in its new home. Mostly that involves, as you’d think, changing the Windows paths to Unix format and adjusting them to point to the right place. But there are a couple of less obvious aspects that need attention. One of those is your theme. The video recommends disabling the theme and reinstalling later. Similarly, pdf-tools can cause problems and the video recommends deleting it from Elpa and reinstalling once you get Emacs running.

All that sounds a little complicated but is really no more difficult than moving between some Linux distributions. I like to factor out system specific data to separate files and load the appropriate file based on the host system. That allows me to have a “universal” init.el that works on all my machines and even makes moving to a new OS relatively easy.

If you’re planning on moving off Windows, this is a worthwhile video to watch.

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