I think this might also be relevant: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-03/msg00084.html   At least if a README is present someone might think to look at it. If none is present then it's a guessing game. And even with the README, as the message above indicates, the zip-file naming convention is not obvious.   From: Christopher Smith [mailto:cmsmith193@gmail.com] Yeah Mr. Morris, you're onto something there. I'm a sophomore physics student just looking around the web for useful tools and Quora.com lead me to emacs. I honestly have no idea what it is though and my programming skills end at hello world. Us windows users are definitely used to just going url => downloads => windows => for latest version click here! Thank you all so much though for the quick responses!   On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 12:09 AM, Glenn Morris wrote: FWIW I think the point here is that "here's the ftp server, you figure out which file you need" is now archaic. The new thing is A Big Button that you press that defaults to the "right" file for you, and a small "other versions" link. See eg HYPERLINK "http://firefox.com" \nfirefox.com. Also, one normally skips to the end to get the latest version, but on HYPERLINK "http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows" \nftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows, "emacs-25.1-2" sorts before "emacs-25.1", which doesn't help. Perhaps MS Windows users are additionally confused to not get an .exe file that they Just Click to start installing. There's a 200 line README file that explains what to do, but no-one reads the README. :)