The GNU Emacs Lisp Package Archive is a repository which the GNU Emacs Package Manager can use to simply install or update key emacs packages, such as org-mode. Apparently, according to the Org-mode FAQs it is a standard part of the Emacs 24 distribution1), available for easy installation in Emacs 23, too.
I followed their instructions, to check that it wasn't already installed:
M-x list-packages [No Match]
Downloaded it from their link, whence it arrives named lisp_emacs-lisp_package.el; this tells me to put it in my d:/usr/emacs-23/lisp/emacs-lisp
folder and prune the name down to package.el
.
Their instructions then provide the lines to add to one's emacs initialization file to have the package manager loaded on start-up.
;; change "~/elisp/" as appropiate (setq load-path (cons "~/elisp" load-path)) ;; Add the below lines *at the end* of your .emacs. This ;; ensures that packages installed with package manager ;; overrides other local installation (require 'package) (package-initialize)
However, I didn't know where to find my init file on my Windows XP system. I consulted the emacs documentation (not the first time, I assure y'all) to be reminded that emacs, on start up, looks for
~/.emacs ~/.emacs.el ~/.emacs.d/init.el
in that order, using the first it finds (and not applying them in cascade). Decoding this, one needs to find where ~/
is. As explained in the General Variables section of the *info*, ~/
means HOME
in *NIX systems and finds its equivalent location in Windows systems at c:/Documents and Settings/
UserName/Application Data/
.
Sure enough, I found
c:/Documents and Settings/Maurice/Application Data/.emacs.d/
, a folder with no init.el
(yet), just a sub-folder called auto-save-list
.
Naturally, I added init.el
with the code provided, changing it as instructed to suite my installation:
(setq load-path (cons "d:/usr/emacs-23/lisp/emacs-lisp" load-path))
, restarted emacs, and this time the response to M-x list-packages
was a buffer with a list of packages available from the repository, which now, after installing the current org, is :
all 1.0 available Edit all lines matching a given regexp auctex 11.86 available Integrated environment for *TeX* company 0.5 available Flexible inline text and code completion debbugs 0.2 available SOAP library to access debbugs servers epoch-view 0.0.1 available Minor mode to visualize epoch timestamps js2-mode 20090814 available Improved JavaScript editing mode load-dir 0.0.3 available Load all Emacs Lisp files in a given directory markchars 0.2.0 available Mark chars fitting certain characteristics minimap 1.0 available Sidebar showing a "mini-map" of a buffer muse 3.20 available Authoring and publishing tool rainbow-mode 0.1 available Colorize color names in buffers register-list 0.1 available Interactively list/edit registers sisu-mode 3.0.3 available Major mode for SiSU markup text uni-confusables 0.1 available Unicode confusables table windresize 0.1 available Resize windows interactively org 20110903 installed Outline-based notes management and organizer
How wonderful! This is much simpler than than building with a compatible make
for my platform after locating and downloading from git (or a tarball). Thank you, emacs developers!