RE: Gnu emacs under Windows: .emacs and _emacs and savehist

[Drew Adams]

> > As I said, I just require the library and
> > call the mode - I didn't customize anything.
>
> In that case, of course, you are yourself responsible for doing
> everything necessary for setting the mode.

Huh?

(1) That works; it is sufficient, at least with Emacs 22 and its version of
savehist.el.

(2) That is just what the commentary in the library says to do: put
(savehist-mode 1) in ~/.emacs.

;; To use savehist, turn on savehist-mode by putting the following in
;; `~/.emacs': (savehist-mode 1)

It does also say that you can alternatively customize the option:

;; or with customize: `M-x customize-option RET savehist-mode RET'.

In neither case should "you, yourself, be responsible for doing everything
necessary for setting the mode", whatever that might mean. Either method
should work fine.

The important things wrt the OP are: (1) to know how savehist works and what
it does (how the history is used), (2) to know that _emacs should work as
well as .emacs on Windows, (3) to know that .emacs is a file, not a
directory, (4) to get rid of the `savehist-length' setting, which is not
used in savehist versions that have `savehist-mode', (5) to get rid of
`savehist-load', which is obsolete for the same versions, (6) to either (a)
call function `savehist-mode' with a positive arg or (b) customize variable
`savehist-mode', to turn the mode on.

David reminded us that customizing the variable (= 6b) will work because of
the custom setter function; I helped with the rest. Hopefully, it should
work for you now. Let us know if you still have a problem. We still don't
know what version of savehist and Emacs you have, but that's only important
if things still do not work for you.