I’m currently rebuilding my main Windows machine after it had become close to unusable. Given that I upgraded it multiple times from Windows 7 all the way to Windows 11 without ever reinstalling the OS, this shouldn’t have come as a major surprise. Either way, this is the reason for the sudden outburst of Windows related posts so I can go and refer to my blog as my Internet Notes repository.

If you install GNU Emacs on Windows, by default it places its home directory into %USERPROFILE%\Application Data or similar. My Emacs configuration is under version control and I prefer a similar setup to Unix-like OSs where all of the configuration files and directories are hanging off the main user directory, which is %USERPROFILE% in Windows.

The easiest way I found is to simple set HOME to %USERPROFILE% in the system environment variable dialog.

Oh, and as a separate nice surprise, winget now has GNU Emacs 29.1 as the default version.