I haven't used Windows since around Windows 7, and that would be probably the last time I used Emacs on Windows, so, obviously, not an up-to-day response.
Here's what I recall were the major pain points then:
* You need to choose between MSYS2 and "native" Windows binaries (add WSL today for more choices).
* The choice above will influence how you interact with various shells. Getting shell encoding right and filtering out escape sequences that don't render well in Emacs terminal emulator of choice was a headache.
* All interactions with filesystem are slower. If a mode depends on interaction with filesystem a lot, like Magit, you are going to have a bad time. At the time CEDET was still a thing, but on Windows it was absolutely unusable. (Very infrequently I need to look at wife's laptop which runs some more modern Windows, and that's usually because she has some problems with Git or other infra, and I installed Emacs there to make dealing with this stuff easier: Maigt is awfully slow there).
* I don't know if Tramp has any kind of support for the convoluted and bizarre Windows user permission management -- I never had enough time to figure that out. On Linux, if I need to edit files owned by root, I do C-x f /sudo::/..., but there doesn't seem to be anything like that for Windows.
* In general, you will be missing stuff that you could easily accomplish in Emacs by pressing "!" in Dired buffer -- because there's nothing / very little of useful stuff you can call on files. If you don't install emacs with other MSYS2 utilities, your search options in Dired will be bad (default Windows find), similarly bad is the find in files that normally relies on grep to work. Same situation with spellchecker which relies on an external program.
I'd still take it over something like VSCode, but I would have to invest a lot of effort into bringing it up to the possible / desired level of comfort. It's definitely not the best place to use Emacs. Luckily, today, I'm in the place where I can, for the most part, forget MS Windows exists.
Here's what I recall were the major pain points then:
* You need to choose between MSYS2 and "native" Windows binaries (add WSL today for more choices).
* The choice above will influence how you interact with various shells. Getting shell encoding right and filtering out escape sequences that don't render well in Emacs terminal emulator of choice was a headache.
* All interactions with filesystem are slower. If a mode depends on interaction with filesystem a lot, like Magit, you are going to have a bad time. At the time CEDET was still a thing, but on Windows it was absolutely unusable. (Very infrequently I need to look at wife's laptop which runs some more modern Windows, and that's usually because she has some problems with Git or other infra, and I installed Emacs there to make dealing with this stuff easier: Maigt is awfully slow there).
* I don't know if Tramp has any kind of support for the convoluted and bizarre Windows user permission management -- I never had enough time to figure that out. On Linux, if I need to edit files owned by root, I do C-x f /sudo::/..., but there doesn't seem to be anything like that for Windows.
* In general, you will be missing stuff that you could easily accomplish in Emacs by pressing "!" in Dired buffer -- because there's nothing / very little of useful stuff you can call on files. If you don't install emacs with other MSYS2 utilities, your search options in Dired will be bad (default Windows find), similarly bad is the find in files that normally relies on grep to work. Same situation with spellchecker which relies on an external program.
I'd still take it over something like VSCode, but I would have to invest a lot of effort into bringing it up to the possible / desired level of comfort. It's definitely not the best place to use Emacs. Luckily, today, I'm in the place where I can, for the most part, forget MS Windows exists.