bug#16087: Setting HOME environment variable in Emacs on Windows has side effects

[SDS <sds.biz.main@gmail.com>]

On 12/8/2013 3:09 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Thanks.  So this sounds like a one-time issue, which, once solved to
> your satisfaction, should never pop up again, right?

A workaround which directly or indirectly prevents this from happening 
is fine. It hasn't even really been an issue unless I'm trying to access 
files within the directory containing the .emacs.d for NT-Emacs. I 
noticed it when I tried to open .emacs.d/init.el for NT-Emacs and it 
opened the init.el for Emacs-w32 instead.

I could isolate the .emacs.d for NT-Emacs inside its own directory, and 
point to that in HKCU\SOFTWARE\GNU\Emacs\HOME before changing HOME in 
init.el. That way it's only a problem when trying to edit the init.el 
for NT-Emacs, which I could workaround by invoking NT-Emacs with --no-init.

I just wasn't sure if there were any other apparent side effects to 
changing the HOME directory in the init.el file. I figured out already 
that doing so requires changing HOME at the end of init.el, and setting 
some directory variables to the full path pointing to .emacs.d for 
NT-Emacs. I also wasn't sure if a better/simpler workaround existed.

> As for setting this up, my suggestion would be to set HOME in the
> environment to point to the Cygwin's HOME, and augment that by
> whatever you need in the Bash init files.

Won't that require merging the .emacs.d directories for the two ports? 
Is there a way of doing this without having them interfere with each other?


Cheers,

SDS