Re: emacs-home variable for Windows

["B. T. Raven" <nihil@nihilo.net>]

Lennart Borgman wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 6:50 AM, B. T. Raven <nihil@nihilo.net> wrote:
>> Lennart Borgman wrote:
>>> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 2:00 AM, ken <gebser@mousecar.com> wrote:
>>>> I carry a USB stick to the job.  It's got emacs installed on it and
>>>> there's a link on my desktop that I click (after inserting the stick)
>>>> and emacs fires up.  It's nice.  I use it every day.  With the paucity
>>>> of decent editors from Windows, I *need* it.
>>>>
>>>> There's a couple minor hassles though that I'd like to dispense with.
>>>> One is that I don't know a way to tell emacs what the HOME directory is.
>>>>  In the past I've just gone into the registry and change some variable
>>>> there.  I don't remember where that is or how to do it though.  Besides,
>>>> I prefer to have the variable defined in my .emacs (which is at the
>>>> top-level directory on the USB stick).  (After emacs loads, I do "M-x
>>>> loadfile RETURN e:/.emacs" and that little task loads up the rest of the
>>>> stuff emacs needs to know.  But I don't know how tell emacs to make e:/
>>>> the home directory.
>>>
>>> There is a library usb-setup.el in Emacs+EmacsW32 for this.
>>
>> Can this .el file be downloaded separately from EmacsW32 to use with the
>> standard Emacs w32 build? Is it somewhere in nXhtml 1.97 or has it been
>> removed?
> 
> No, at the moment it is only in Emacs+EmacsW32 and I have not had time
> to setup a repository for that.
> 
> However all that file does is to use the ideas from
> 
>   http://at-aka.blogspot.com/2006/06/portable-emacs-22050-on-usb.html
> 
> and reorganises them a bit. So just look there instead.
> 
> 

Thanks, Lennart. I almost understand the stuff at that link but I can't
see how the variable 'data-directory refers to the right drive letter
until after Emacs is launched from the flash drive. The drive letter
could be G:\ when plugged in today and H:\ tomorrow.

With GnuW32 utils I got as far as producing:

df -a | tail -1 > usbemacs.bat

with the result:

STORE N GO             4021232   1850100   2171132  47% G:\

I am at a loss as to where I should go from here.

Thanks again,

Ed