or how to carry a gnu inside a whale

Non-Medium article can be found on blog.datasloth.io

I have been in an ongoing relationship with my favourite editor Emacs for a couple of years now and as any developer can attest, time emphasizes faults more than anything else.

Emacs is supported very well by myriads of contributors throughout the years, but one thing has been clear, which is no surprise given Emacs’ roots. Windows is a second class citizen!

At the time or writing officially you can only get emacs 25.3 for a windows system and, sadly requiring you to download third party tools such as cygwin/msys2 In order to have a more-functional experience, or 64bit version.

Among the user-contributed options 26.0 was the latest development version I was able to find, and used to be my primary choice due to some updates in 26.0 I found indispensable.

Now… I could go on a rant about how I had a python script that would fetch the latest emacs, create a shortcut linking to my init file, download some tools that I find useful (ag the silversearcher, and a wide array of dlls not found in windows natively), add everything to path… You get the idea, emacs on windows is far from plug-and-play.