Installing emacs plugins on windows

Question

I already looked through other topics, but I still couldn't find a solution. I'm trying to install "nxhtml" plugin for Emacs in windows 7. I already setup my "HOME" environment variable as "C:\". So, my .emacs.d folder is there, and I put the nxhtml in there and added the following line to my "_emacs.d" file, as the readme says:

(load "C:\.emacs.d\nxhtml\autostart.el")

But it doesn't load.

I also tried putting: (add-to-list 'load-path "C:\.emacs.d\nxhtml")

(load "autostart.el")

But to no avail... can anyone shed some light here? tnx.

Answer 1

\ is special in the (double-quote) read syntax for strings, as certain characters take on a new meaning when prefixed by a backslash (e.g. \n is a newline, \t is a tab, and \" is a double-quote character). When the following character does not have any special meaning in conjunction with the backslash, that character is used verbatim, and the backslash is ignored.

"C:\.emacs.d\nxhtml\autostart.el" is actually the string:

C:.emacs.d
xhtml^Gutostart.el

To include a \ in the string you need to write \\

However, although it will understand the backslashes, Emacs is nowadays consistent across all platforms in allowing / as a directory separator¹; so just do that instead.

¹ and the obsolete directory-sep-char variable has been removed entirely.

Answer 2

A number of points here:

Firstly, _emacs.d is not a default file name for your init file, ie emacs will not load it automatically. Try ~/.emacs.d/init.el, or ~/.emacs instead.

Secondly, Windows 7 has a feature where it prevents programs from writing to certain system directories, but for backwards compatibility for the many old programs that do this, rather than causing them to fail, it silently redirects the write elsewhere, in an application specific directory. C:\ is one of those directories, so setting your HOME to point there is asking for trouble.

Thirdly, see the other response about backslash being an escape character in Lisp strings.