Windows – the best way to run emacs under Windows

I've had success with Sysinternals Process Explorer. With this, you can search to find what process(es) have a file open, and you can use it to close the handle(s) if you want. Of course, it is safer to close the whole process. Exercise caution and judgement.

To find a specific file, use the menu option Find->Find Handle or DLL... Type in part of the path to the file. The list of processes will appear below.

If you prefer command line, Sysinternals suite includes command line tool Handle, that lists open handles.

Examples

• c:\Program Files\SysinternalsSuite>handle.exe |findstr /i "e:\" (finds all files opened from drive e:\"
• c:\Program Files\SysinternalsSuite>handle.exe |findstr /i "file-or-path-in-question"

I spent quite a bit of time trying to build emacs on RHEL5.7, to no avail. Then, back to the google, and I found a repo with emacs23 RPMs for CentOS/RHEL 5.x.

http://puias.princeton.edu/data/puias/unsupported/5.7/x86_64/

To use it, use the bundled emacs21 to create a text file in /etc/yum.repos.d/puias-unsupported.repo .
It should have these contents:

[puias-unsupported]
name=PUIAS Unsupported $releasever
baseurl=http://puias.princeton.edu/data/puias/unsupported/5/$basearch/
enabled=0
gpgcheck=0

Then, use it like this:

sudo yum --disablerepo="*" --enablerepo=puias-unsupported install emacs23

The RPMs are:

• emacs23-23.2-5.x86_64.rpm
• emacs23-common-23.2-5.x86_64.rpm

If you install it this way, it will be placed into /usr/emacs23/ . It does not replace the existing emacs21.

There is also a nox version of emacs23 in that repo. And a bunch of other stuff.

Additionally, to make it work correctly and prevent warnings, I did the following:

cd /usr/share/emacs/

ln -s /usr/emacs23/share/emacs/23.2

mkdir 23.2/leim

mkdir -p /usr/libexec/emacs/23.2/x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu