How do I install Emacs on windows 10 pro

Question

I can't find a clear tutorial for how to do this on windows 10. Normally there are a few tricks required to get it running properly so I thought I would ask here before trying one of the windows 8 tutorials

The specific "flavour" of Emacs is not particularly important

Answer 1

As mentionned in the comments, their installation is pretty much the same across Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 computers, but I prefer a slightly different method.

Chocolatey offers simple and straightforward installation on Windows 7+. The downside is, you need administrator account access. The emacs package there is not always up to date, but it gets updated pretty regularly.

To use this method, open elevated Cmd/PowerShell and install the choco package manager first, then update environmental variables:

refreshenv

and install either emacs64 package (which I recommend, if you have 64 bit Windows 10):

choco install emacs64

or emacs 32-bit:

choco install emacs

Now you can start Emacs from the start menu, or manually from the default location C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\bin\runemacs.exe. To update Emacs, use choco update emacs64 or choco update emacs.

Answer 2

After reading many tutorials and readmes I was unable to install Emacs and spacemacs on my machine until now. It is super easy.

1. create a folder in a directory you wish to install (eg I'd like to install on drive c:/
2. add a new user variable named HOME and valued to the created folder (eg c:/emacs/
3. download the latest version of Emacs
4. extract the content of the downloaded file into the folder you have created a couple of steps ago. (eg c:/emacs/)
5. open runemacs.exe located in c:/emacs/bin/ directory; this would generate a folder named .emacs.d in c:/emacs/

installing spacemacs

6. quit Emacs
7. download spacemacs
8. extract the content in the c:/emacs/.emacs.d directory
9. finally re-execute runemacs.exe.

I've learned about the instruction in this video