I’ve been happily Windows free for more than 20 years but it’s a sad fact that some of our brethren are forced, for reasons beyond their control, to work in the Windows environment. That’s hard on any Unix-head but especially so for Emacs users. It’s a sad fact that Emacs just doesn’t run very well on Windows and setting up the environment is harder than it should be.
Adrien Brochard recently gave a talk to the New York Emacs Meetup on his solution to this problem. He’s a Linux guy whose current job requires he work on a Windows machine. His answer is to Virtualize Emacs. What that means is that he runs Emacs on Arch Linux that in turn runs in a VirtualBox instance. As Brochard points out, this works even on locked down machines to which the developer doesn’t have administrative rights.
One of the nice things about this solution is how easy it is. Brochard has some scripts he uses to automate the installation of Linux and Emacs. During the presentation, he builds the entire environment, including VirtualBox, from scratch. It takes about 25 minutes but most of it is automated so that once he starts it, he can go on with his presentation. He says that even if you get something wrong you can simply blow away the VirtualBox instance and start over.
There is, of course, some overhead and Brochard does a good job on discussing that aspect too. All things considered, though, he believes that it’s the best solution for running Emacs on Windows.
The video is about 33 minutes so plan accordingly. It’s an excellent presentation and interesting even if you aren’t faced with running Emacs on Windows.
As a final note, I’ve discovered that I’m more partisan about editors than I thought. Back in 2016 I was outraged when someone did something similar to run Notepad++ under Ubuntu. In retrospect, it seems that it was the idea of using Notepad++ that outraged me not the use of a virtual environment to run it in.