Re: emacs won't start interactively

[Óscar Fuentes]

Joe_Trivers--- via help-gnu-emacs <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> writes:

> I am trying to install emacs on a new (to me) desktop Windows 10 PC.
> After following the download instructions for Windows, clicking on the
> runemacs.exe icon has no apparent effect. Running emacs from the
> command prompt with a --help argument produces the Usage: line and
> list of command line options. Running emacs as: emacs-26.1\bin\emacs
> --batch -eval (message \"hi there\") produces the expected string: hi
> there so apparently command line parsing and elisp execution works.
> However, running just emacs-26.1\bin\emacs returns almost immediately
> with no output, and so does emacs-26.1\bin\emacs -nw.
>
> First I downloaded and unpacked emacs-26.2-i686.zip from a mirror and
> it didn't work. I then tried emacs-26.2-x86_64.zip
> emacs-26.1-x86_64.zip from the ftp.gnu.org site, as well as the
> no-deps version with emacs-26-x86_64-deps unpacked on top. None of
> them worked. I moved the unpacked tree from <me>\Downloads to c:\GNU
> but that didn't seem to help either.
>
> I installed 26.1-x86_64 on a Windows 10 laptop last year (in c:\GNU)
> and it works just fine. Both PCs are set up by my employer's IT
> department, presumably using the same procedure. I can't figure out
> what's different on this system. Using "run as administrator" doesn't
> seem to make any difference.
>
> Can someone please advise me what might be wrong, or what I can try
> next?

What's the exit code of emacs?

emacs.exe -nw
echo %errorlevel%

or

start /wait emacs.exe
echo %errorlevel%

If, on the command line, you set PATH to the bare minimum
(c:\windows\system32) and then run emacs.exe, does it work?

You can try installing Dependencies [1] and see if there is some missing
dll or a mismatch.

1. https://github.com/lucasg/Dependencies