bug#27589: Wrong documentation for .emacs lookup on Windows

[Björn Lindqvist]

Sorry, this was a PEBKAC. I had used  (setenv "HOME" (concat (getenv "HOMEDRIVE") (getenv "HOMEPATH"))) to set the HOME environment variable from within emacs which I now understand is a terrible idea.

2017-07-05 19:10 GMT+02:00 Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>:

> From: Björn Lindqvist <bjourne@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2017 18:08:23 +0200
>
> Information in these pages is incorrect:
>
> https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Windows-HOME.html
> https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/efaq-w32/Location-of-init-file.html
>
> In my case .emacs is at "C:\Users\bjorn\AppData\Roaming\.emacs" Emacs does not set the value of the
> HOME variable to that location:
>
> (getenv "HOME")
> "C:\\Users\\bjorn"
>
> And "Within Emacs, <~> at the beginning of a file name is expanded to your HOME directory, so you can
> always find your .emacs file by typing the command C-x C-f ~/.emacs." is therefore not true:
>
> (expand-file-name "~/.emacs")
> "c:/Users/bjorn/.emacs"

The information in the manual is correct, I just verified it both in
Emacs 24.5 and 25.  The problems that you see are most probably due to
some local issue on your system, like ownership of directories or some
environment variable.

And btw, what version of Windows is that?  And how are you invoking
Emacs? from some shell prompt, from a desktop shortcut, from a
task-bar shortcut, or some other way?

--

mvh/best regards Björn Lindqvist