I’ve been using the official GNU distribution of Emacs for Windows for the last few years and am very happy with it. Well, usually I am very happy with it until someone sends me a 25GB log file I need to analyse and the 32 bit Emacs refuses to play when faced with the enormity of the file in question.

This happened again recently so I finally decided to go look for a 64 bit Emacs for Windows, which led me to emacs-w64:

I haven’t spent a lot of time with it (yet) but first impressions are very favourable. It starts quickly, seems responsive and, well, edits texts. In other words, I like it so far and I’ll keep using it for a while to see if first impressions hold up.

Oh, and there’s also the side benefit of being emacs-w64 already having a 24.4 build available. At the time of writing, the official GNU Windows build still appears to be 24.3.