Re: How to *properly* set up Emacs on Windows?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2022 09:14:20 +0100
> From: Joost <joostkremers@fastmail.fm>
> 
> >   . The above policy will not work with Git, because it _must_ be able
> >     to call the MSYS2 Bash and other MSYS2 programs.  If you want to
> >     invoke Git from Emacs, have a git.cmd batch file on your Path
> >     which will use SETLOCAL to add Git's bin directory to Path
> >     temporarily, for the duration of the Git command, and invoke
> >     git.exe.  This will work for most simple Git commands; for more
> >     complex Git commands that don't work from Emacs, use Git Bash
> >     window to invoke them, and set up emacsclient to be the EDITOR for
> >     Git commands instead.
> 
> I use magit on Linux, and have so far continued to do so on Windows, even though it's extremely slow (apparently a known problem.) Git itself is installed from <https://gitforwindows.org/>, which adds to my confusion, because it is apparently a separate (and minimal) MSYS2 installation, which one is advised to keep separate from a "normal" MSYS2 installation. In order to use it inside Emacs, I add "C:/Program Files/Git/usr/bin" to `exec-path` (it's not in my system path). Does that make sense?

Yes: don't do that!  Git/usr/bin is a directory where MSYS2 programs
used by Git are kept; you do NOT want them on your exec-path.  That's
exactly why I wrote the above exception for Git.  Óscar mentioned 2
other possible arrangements:

> MSYS2 does not provide git as a MinGW package, so [...] install "Git for
> Windows", which provide an almost native port. [...] the
> installer will ask if you want its executables added to PATH, either all
> or just git.exe. My advice is to not modify PATH or to add just git.exe.
> You can set vc-git-program to where git.exe is and VC will work without
> git.exe on PATH.

Any of these alternatives will save you from introducing MSYS2
programs into your exec-path, and will avoid the kind of problems you
encountered.