Home/ Questions/Q 8943567
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-15T11:48:22+00:00

Let’s say, I have emacs on Windows. What I would like to do is

  • 0

Let’s say, I have emacs on Windows. What I would like to do is to run emacs from the cmd and have my startup directory as default directory in emacs.

I already put the emacs dir into my PATH variable, so I am able to execute ‘runemacs’ from anywhere in my cmd. But the default directory in emacs does not equal to the startup directory of emacs. C-x C-f still points me to ‘c:\emacs’ which, in turn, is specified in emacs config
(setq default-directory “C:/emacs”).

What should I do to have default directory pointing to the startup directory?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You could do something like this:

    (add-to-list
 'command-switch-alist
 '("-cwd" . (lambda (x) (setq default-directory (or x (getenv "PWD"))))))

    In your .emacs file, and create an alias for emacs -cwd, or, if I understand it correct, on Windows it would be runemacs -cwd. Also, iirc, on Windows it’s CWD, not PWD. Well, the meaning of this piece of code is:

    • add a function to handle a custom argument to Emacs, namely -cwd.
    • when trigged, get the value of environment’s current working directory and set default-directory to whatever it is.
    • 0