Setting up XEmacs with po-mode on Windows

XEmacs has been supported on Windows for a long time and can be downloaded from here: http://www.xemacs.org/Download/win32. The po-mode is bundled with XEmacs (no need to get the GNU gettext distribution).

However, you need a MULE-enabled XEmacs binary to edit the UTF-8-encoded PO files and I could not find such a binary for Windows on www.xemacs.org. What I did is this:

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)

Yes, this is a bit complicated... Welcome to the wonderful world of XEmacs! :-) If you never used XEmacs before, prepare yourself for a steep learning curve.

BTW, your installation directory does not have to be C:\Program Files\XEmacs. I used this for simplicity in the above instructions.