RHO Emacs

Description

ρEmacs is a preconfigured distribution of GNU Emacs editor for Microsoft Windows. It offers some enhancements over the standard Emacs experience and targets several Windows-specific issues.

Features

RHO Emacs provides a custom launcher that starts Emacs in a server mode and then acts like emacsclient.
The home directory of the standard Emacs is bound to USERPROFILE or HOME environment variables. The home directory of ρEmacs could be anywhere, and even could be specified as a command-line argument to the launcher.
A portable installation is possible.
The Hack typeface, which works quite fast with Emacs font-lock mode, is used by default. This allows to avoid lags and freezes when editing large files.
Some common POSIX utilities used by Emacs, such as find/grep and aspell, are provided by the distribution.
ρEmacs also includes several popular libraries, modes and themes which comprise a reasonably convenient configuration out of the box.
Capture with org-protocol may be configured by a single check in the installer.
The preconfigured org-wiki package allows to create a local org-mode based wiki.
The preconfigured org-roam package could be used for non-hierarchical knowledge management.

Emacs Home Directory

ρEmacs installer will ask where do you want to store your personal settings and files. The following three options are available:

Create a dedicated home directory for Emacs - installer will ask you to manually specify the path of ρEmacs home directory.
Portable installation - ρEmacs will be installed as a portable distribution. In this case Emacs will use the directory named home at the root of the installation as user's personal directory. Installer will also not create shortcuts or perform any other system integration.
Always use the environment of a current user - Emacs will always use a subfolder named rho-emacs inside My Documents folder of a current user.

ρEmacs launcher

ρEmacs could be launched using a shortcut from Windows Start Menu, but the launcher is also accessible in the command line as the rho command. It passes any arguments that do not start with a slash (/) to the underlying program which may be emacs if Emacs is not running, or emacsclient otherwise. The /HOME command-line argument allows to specify the home directory of ρEmacs in the following form /HOME:path/to/the/directory, for example: /HOME:d:/rho-home. This may be convenient for use in Windows shortcuts.

Use rhoc command to run Emacs in the terminal (it will act as emacsclient if Emacs is already running).

ρEmacs enhancement libraries

ido, fido, iswitchb, ibuffer, uniquify, save-place, desktop-save, org-bullets, tabbar and bookmark+ modes could be enabled by default.

ρEmacs installer will also offer to activate one of the following UI themes: Spacemacs theme, Moe theme, Arjen. More themes could be selected after the installation.

You may install ρEmacs without any enhancements and configure it as you wish.

Org Mode tools

ρEmacs takes care of the configuration of some org-mode tools that are very tedious to set up manually:

org-protocol

The installer is able to automatically configure org-protocol to capture links and selected text from web browsers. Notably, in the case of western system locales it should seamlessly work with the Org Capture extension (Chrome, Firefox) without any additional configuration (Emacs should be running during the capture process). More complex capture schemes are possible. By default, the captured content is saved at the file named ~/org/capture.org (configurable through the org-default-notes-file variable).

org-wiki

org-wiki package offers a firm foundation for a personal knowledge base. Its clip.jar utility is included into the distribution (a private Java runtime necessary to run it is provided by the installer). The default wiki root directory is located at ~/org/wiki.

org-wiki will install the helm package with its dependencies on the first run of Emacs, so Internet connection is required.

org-roam

org-roam package could be used for non-hierarchical knowledge management, such as Zettelkasten. Its emacsql-sqlite.exe utility is already precompiled, so no compiler installation is necessary. org-roam files and database are stored in the ~/org-roam directory. The following key-bindings are available:

C-c n f	org-roam-node-find
C-c n r	org-roam-node-random
C-c n i	org-roam-node-insert
C-c n o	org-id-get-create
C-c n t	org-roam-tag-add
C-c n a	org-roam-alias-add
C-c n l	org-roam-buffer-toggle

Installing Third Party Emacs Extensions

Automated installation

Automated package installation is possible through the MELPA repository available with the M-x package-list-packages command.

Manual installation

To install a package manually, you need to place it into a subdirectory of ~/.emacs.d folder (where ~ is a shortcut for the home directory). Then you need to add the following line to your ~/.emacs configuration file:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/my-library/")

to add the package to Emacs load list. Then you should initialize the package according to its manual, for example, by placing (require 'my-library) line into ~/.emacs.