Installing on Windows 10 (2020 Edition)

[AKielhorn]

Hello!

I am currently setting up Emacs and Scimax on a new Windows 10 computer.

Use-package had problems installing

• dashboard
• helm-bibtex

Some further errors are probably due to the fact that these packages didn't install. (I used old version that worked with a previous installation.)

It seems ELPA doesn't have versions compatible with Emacs 25.2.1.

Are there any plan to update the Emacs supplied with scimax?

[jkitchin]

I don't currently have a way to update the emacs supplied with scimax (no windows machine available). You can certainly use any emacs version you can install. I have had ok luck with https://github.com/m-parashar/emax64 in the past, and would recommend starting there. you just need to add "-l path/to/scimax/init.el" to a command line call to open scimax.

[AKielhorn]

Thanks for the pointer to a more recent Emacs. You may want to add this information to the installing instruction.

I have downloaded and installed the 26.3 version (Same as I use on the Mac.)

After that I adjusted the PATH in scimax.bat and changed to the new runemacs.

set LANG=C
set PATH=.\emax64\bin;%PATH%
set PATH=%PATH%;.\wkhtmltopdf\bin
start "" ".\emax64\bin\runemacs.exe" -q -l ".\init.el" %1

A few package updates later, it now works again (minus #393).

This is not something I can ask a normal Windows user to do. I'm currently thinking about building a zip archive of a working setup and distribute that to potential users. (While I was thinking, my computer build a 400 MB archive.)

[jkitchin]

You can see one idea I was headed towards last year at https://github.com/scimacs. Clearly, I lost momentum in working on that! In particular see https://github.com/scimacs/pymax/blob/master/scimax/scripts/install-scimax-win.sh, which has some code that installs an emacs. It also references a repo of elisp files to get started.

Now, however, I am sort of leaning towards Docker. Only sort of though because, although it seems to solve the emacs installation issues, it adds several complexities:

1. You need docker running
2. you need an x-server running
3. you need to connect it to a directory where your org files are.

I think this could be managed for the most part with a simple shell script (at least it would be as simple as the url I listed above).

This is still an experimental idea, I don't have a sense for how fast it would run, and if it is fast enough for me.

WDYT?

[AKielhorn]

About Docker:

This is only slightly more crazy than my idea to install a virtual machine running Linux. :-) And a bit less crazy than using a Raspberry PI and telnet into that.

(I actually did both.)

The problem is that I am not my target audience. I want to introduce "normal" Windows users to Org Mode.

It should be installable without local admin rights.

(Some years ago I had a problem installing scimax with the portable version of git since it behaves slightly different from the regular version.)

About scimax:

In https://github.com/scimacs you rely on bash. That is an extra install on Windows and you don't have it without installing the git distribution first. Of course you want git but I usually get it via SourceTree.

While I can't imagine working without bash, a regular Windows user will be overwhelmed by all the new things. That's why I try to use only scimax.bat.

You provide initial versions of all the packages. That is good, because you have a known working state. But it is bad, because it is an old state and at one point you need to ask the user to update.

Relying on MELPA is a good way in theory, but it doesn't keep old versions for old Emacses, which was the reason to start this thread.

Right now I keep building a zip file of my working installation, it is not that big.

[jkitchin]

The main reason I use the initial versions of the packages is (at least some years ago), on Windows emacs would often fail to pull all the packages from MELPA reliably and would require a lot of restarts. Even when it did work, it also took a long time to install them. In an ideal world, I would be updating it periodically with known working states, so people could reliably update to working states, or they could take their chances on git pull between major releases.

The docker almost works. It is not fast to start up though, and I have not tried to integrate anaconda python, and latex for a pretty complete scientific publishing tool. That would make the docker image pretty big, several GB probably.

What you refer to with zip files is not that different than having tagged versions in a git repo, and some easy way to check one out (you can even get a url to the zip of a tagged version for that). For example:

https://github.com/jkitchin/scimax/archive/master.zip and https://github.com/jkitchin/scimax/archive/ob-ipython-upstream.zip are urls to zip files of two tagged versions of scimax (I guess I should use some real version numbers :(). This is more a distribution issue, you can just as well put zip files on GDrive, or any website.

scimacs is still kind of a proof of concept idea. I don't use Windows at all these days, so it is also sort of on hold indefinitely, or at least until psot-COVID when I am back in my office with a Windows machine!

[jkitchin]

I am moving forward for now with a homebrew approach to installing scimax that may resolve this.