How can I have a portable Emacs?

Question

Is there a way run Emacs from a USB drive? I am a Windows user and I would like to be able use it on any PC without an Emacs install.

Solution 1

Yes, the "normal" Emacs distribution for Windows is precompiled and just runs without having to do any install. Just get one of the *.zip files from the usual place, unpack it onto a USB disk, and you can use it directly. (The actual binary is inside the "bin/" directory.)

The only thing you may want to do is set it up to look for ".emacs" always on the USB disk instead of on your hard drive; see

 (info "(emacs) Windows HOME")

on how to do that.

Solution 2

You can read Emacs-related pages at PortableApps.com, and if they have not yet ported Emacs to their set of portable applications, then please ask them kindly to add Emacs to the list of text editors. With enough requests they will do this eventually.

Solution 3

There is a beta version of a Portable Apps version of emacs 23.2 here. Initial test works fine here.

Solution 4

create a directory in the root of your usb drive called home.

create site-start.el in the site-lisp folder and then copy this and you are all set to go.

(defvar %~dp0 (substring data-directory 0 3)) (defvar usb-home-dir (concat %~dp0 "home/"))
(setenv "HOME" usb-home-dir)

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