Integrating with Microsoft Windows

Overview

As an application developed for many years exclusively and now primarily for Unix-like operating systems, Emacs does not always integrate very well with Microsoft Windows. However, some simple tweaks can alleviate this lack of integration.

Terminology

Unlike on Unix, where ~ refers to the user's home directory itself, on Windows the value Emacs substitutes for ~ varies according to operating system version. For Windows XP, ~ is Template:Dirname, and on Windows Vista and Windows 7 it is Template:Dirname.

Copy and Paste

Every application on Windows except Emacs uses [C-c] to copy, [C-v] to paste, etc. Emacs doesn't do this by default because it has its own key combinations for these functions which were implemented before these combinations were more or less standardized. To enable this behavior in Emacs, add

(cua-mode 1)

to ~/.emacs