Installing emax64?

[andrewmorse23]

Hi Manish,

Please forgive me in advance, I have almost no idea of what I am doing here, and I am, unfortunately, very new in the world of tech. Long story short: I want to use emacs on Windows 10 to (1) take notes with Org Mode, (2) write in LaTeX with AucTeX, and (3) display and work with PDFs with pdf-tools. I just installed the most basic version of emacs today, and when I try to open PDFs in it (using DocView I guess?), I get an error: "Cannot display this page! Maybe because of a conversion error!"... and at the bottom of the app there's a line of text that says "File mode specification error: file-error Spawning child process Exec format error". I have absolutely no idea what this means, nor the slightest idea how to fix it. When googling around, I came across some of your posts about this distribution (?) of emacs for Windows 10 64 bit that has pdf-tools installed (I am hoping that perhaps pdf-tools could allow me to view pdfs). I've read your instructions for installation, but I am still completely lost. I really don't understand the vocabulary for these types of things. I'll tell you what I did and maybe you could give me some advice? Sorry for having grandpa-skills with computing.

What I did: downloaded the "emax64-27.1-stock.7z" file, extracted it in C:. Then there was a folder "emax64" or something like that, then I went to the bin, launched the addpm.exe file, and tried to launch emacs again... but now there was some black box in the background, and I still couldn't open any PDFs in it.

I'd really love to get emacs up and running, it looks like it would be perfect for what I need---it's just proving to be quite difficult to set up. Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Andrew

[m-parashar]

Hi Andrew,

I recommend two more steps to get started immediately:

1. Get https://github.com/m-parashar/emax64/releases/download/20200930/emax.7z and unpack it into your "HOME" directory. Usually C:\Users<username>\AppData\Roaming unless you have changed it. It contains a barebones startup config files for Emacs on Windows, including pdf-tools, a simple color theme, and a couple more packages preinstalled. It is a stripped down version of what I had on Windows and by no means perfect, but it works. Before you start Emacs again, I also recommend step 2:

2. Install latest MSYS2 from https://repo.msys2.org/distrib/x86_64/. I usually install these packages for building and managing Emacs:

pacman -S base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain \ mingw-w64-x86_64-xpm-nox mingw-w64-x86_64-libtiff \ mingw-w64-x86_64-giflib mingw-w64-x86_64-jbigkit \ mingw-w64-x86_64-libpng mingw-w64-x86_64-libjpeg-turbo \ mingw-w64-x86_64-librsvg mingw-w64-x86_64-libxml2 \ mingw-w64-x86_64-gnutls mingw-w64-x86_64-zlib \ mingw-w64-x86_64-imagemagick mingw-w64-x86_64-poppler \ mingw-w64-x86_64-brotli git

This allows pdf-tools to build itself from source after updates.

This should solve the problem.

Best.

[andrewmorse23]

Thank you so much! Sorry, I didn't realize that I should have followed the next two steps as well. I'll try that. Also, I want to ask, should I uninstall the version of emacs I installed before trying to install your distribution? Specifically, when I first downloaded emacs, I installed in in the C:\program files directory, but I didn't uninstall it before trying to install your version. What do you think?

Cheers,
Andrew

[m-parashar]

My pleasure. Although another distribution in a different directory shouldn't have any adverse effects, so long as PATH or another variables are not set accordingly, I do not recommend installing any platform independent software in a directory structure with spaces on Windows. It may or may not cause issues. You can, for example, have this one in C:\emax64 and the official binaries in C:\emacs and use both without issues. Please note that addpm.exe adds registry entries and creates Start Menu shortcuts pertaining to the directory (consequently, the distribution) it was executed from. So unless there is some specific need to keep two distributions, I suggest you evaluate both and keep the one that works.

Best.