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Setting up XEmacs with po-mode on Windows

Last updated July 25, 2010.

XEmacs is available for Windows and can be downloaded from here: http://www.xemacs.org/Download/win32. The po-mode is bundled with XEmacs and there is no need to get the GNU gettext distribution.

However, you need a MULE-enabled (MUlti-Lingual Emacs) XEmacs binary to edit the UTF-8-encoded PO files and there is no such binary for Windows on www.xemacs.org. This page describes a workaround.

  1. Install XEmacs 21.4.13 using the Netinstall (http://www.xemacs.org/Download/win32/setup.exe)
  2. Replace the files installed in the C:\Program Files\XEmacs\XEmacs-21.4.13 directory with those from http://www.suiyokai.org/tomonori/xemacs/xemacs-i586-pc-win32-21.4.13-mul... as the filename implies, this is a MULE-enabled XEmacs 21.4.13 binary for Windows
  3. Install the MULE packages in the C:\Program Files\XEmacs\mule-packages directory: these can be downloaded from http://ftp.xemacs.org/xemacs/packages/xemacs-all-mule-packages.tar.gz.
  4. Set the environment variable EMACSPACKAGEPATH with this value:
    C:\Program Files\XEmacs\site-packages;C:\Program Files\XEmacs\mule-packages;C:\Program Files\XEmacs\xemacs-packages
  5. To ensure automatic Unicode detection when opening files, add these lines to your init file (init.el):
    (require 'un-define)
    (set-coding-priority-list '(utf-8))
    (set-coding-category-system 'utf-8 'utf-8)
  6. And finally, add this to automatically enable the po-mode:
    (require 'po-mode)

Your installation directory does not have to be C:\Program Files\XEmacs. This path was used for illustrative purposes only.

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