There’s a bunch of tutorial on how to work with EMACS on windows, however I found a lot of them quite confusing and they didn’t really focus on the basics of how to EMACS up and running on windows with a custom color theme. So here’s how I did it from scratch.
There are some various distributions of EMACS for windows but for the purpose of this we will be using NTEMACS, a version of EMACS that uses the native windows GUI. Grab it here:
http://ntemacs.sourceforge.net/
EMACS does not support custom color-themes by default so we will have to download a custom plugin to use themes. Grab this plugin here:
http://download.gna.org/color-theme/
Extract your EMACS folder to c:\emacs or something similar.
On windows your EMACS home directory is going to be your “Application Data” folder in your “Documents and Settings” folder. eg:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data In this folder create a blank text file called “.emacs”.
Now we’re going to have to choose a folder where we will install our EMACS plugins this should be within the EMACS home directory. In “C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data” create a folder called: “.emacs.d\includes” and extact color-theme to that directory.
Now bring up .emacs file in your favorite editor again. We’re going to load up the plugin and select a theme. You do so by adding a include call so EMACS knows about the plugin then you can call plugin functions to load up the theme. In your .emacs file place something like:
(add-to-list & 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/includes/color-theme-6.6.0")
(require & 'color-theme)
(setq color-theme-is-global t)
(color-theme-initialize)
;; A nice dark color theme
(color-theme-deep-blue)Now you can start emacs by calling c:\emacs\bin\runemacs.exe and you should see your wonderful new theme.