Re: Emacs Manual: HOME Directory

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Brent VanFossen" <brentvanfossen@hotmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 20:19:55 +0300
> 
> I've read the Emacs tutorial and the entire manual. I've read several =
> Emacs FAQs. I reread the appropriate (I think) parts of the manual. I =
> didn't find the information I needed to help me tell Emacs where to find =
> my HOME directory.
> 
> I'm using Windows 98 and
> GNU Emacs 20.7.1 (i386-*-windows98.2222) of Tue Jun 13 2000 on buffy
> 
> >From the manual:
> 
> >File Names on MS-DOS
> >
> >  MS-DOS has no notion of home directory, so Emacs on MS-DOS pretends
> >that the directory where it is installed is the value of `HOME'
> >environment variable.  That is, if your Emacs binary, `emacs.exe', is
> >in the directory `c:/utils/emacs/bin', then Emacs acts as if `HOME'
> >were set to `c:/utils/emacs'.  In particular, that is where Emacs looks
> >for the init file `_emacs'.
> 
> I found this not to apply to me, maybe because I'm using Windows 98 and =
> not exactly DOS. However, Emacs only found my _emacs file when I put it =
> in my c:\ root directory. This, of course, is not where I want it.

The next edition of the Emacs manual tells explicitly that on Windows
HOME defaults to C:\.

> And I didn't find anything that told me how exactly to set my =
> environmental HOME variable.

The problem is that the precise instructions how to set HOME are very
different from one version of Windows to another.  Some have
AUTOEXEC.BAT files, other don't.  Some allow to set HOME from the
Control Panel, others don't.

So the Emacs manual leaves it to the user to know how to set
environment variables on their systems.