I have been working on improving Emacs installer for Windows to add support both per-user and per-machine installations. It was made to address the installation issues of users without administrative privileges. This post is a follow up to a post I have made recently.

This effort resulted in adding support for building per-user installers. These are available alongside the usual, per-machine installers. It should be noted, though, that their name might be a little bit deceptive because they support installation in both per-machine and per-user mode. As you might expect the latter does not require administrative privileges.

Feature-wise both kinds of installers provide similar functionality with one notable exception: the per-user installers unable to set and modify environmental variables conditionally depending on selected scope and, thus, unable to add installation directory of Emacs to the Path. This is a limitation of tooling.

Please keep in mind that mixing both per-user and per-machine installations of the same package on the same machine might result in strange behaviour. I would suggest sticking with classical, per-machine only installers if you have enough privileges on your machine.

You can find all the sources on GitHub as well as the pre-built installers for the latest release of GNU Emacs. The provided installers bundle official, unmodified GNU Emacs binaries for Windows.

As usual, If you used an older version of the installer you should be able to perform an in-place upgrade.

The screenshots provided below show the installation of a per-user installer in advanced mode.

Enjoy!

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