This section describes peculiarities of using Emacs on Microsoft Windows. Some of these peculiarities are also relevant to Microsoft’s older MS-DOS operating system. However, Emacs features that are relevant only to MS-DOS are described in a separate section (see Emacs and MS-DOS).
MS-Windows is a non-free operating system; that means it denies its users the freedom that every computer user deserves. That is an injustice. For your freedom’s sake, we urge you to switch to a free operating system.
We support GNU Emacs on proprietary operating systems because we hope this taste of freedom will inspire users to escape from them.
The behavior of Emacs on MS-Windows is reasonably similar to what is documented in the rest of the manual, including support for long file names, multiple frames, scroll bars, mouse menus, and subprocesses. However, a few special considerations apply, and they are described here.
ls on MS-Windows