Mac – How to fall back to the default Color Theme in Emacs

You need to load color-theme and initialize with something like this:

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/color-theme.el/file")
(require 'color-theme)
(load 'zenburn)  ;; requires that zenburn.el is in your load path
(eval-after-load "color-theme"
  '(progn
     (color-theme-initialize)
     (color-theme-zenburn)))

If your distribution of emacs doesn't already have color-theme installed, you'll need to download it first from http://www.nongnu.org/color-theme/

You might want to have a look at Emacs W32. Has some nice customizations for windows.

As for getting color theme working... I won't try to convert things to your current install, seems a few things are off there (file should just be .emacs - not User.emacs, same for .emacs.d directory). Instead I'll just tell you how I have things setup, shouldn't be too hard to translate if you want to keep your current config.

I find it easiest to just create a C:\home directory and set a HOME enviornment variable to point to that directory. Place your .emacs file in there. A .emacs.d directory will be created. I also like to create a directory named emacs_site_lisp in the home folder; C:\home\emacs_site_lisp. I place any and all packages or files under there for easy reference.

Put the color-theme directory in the emacs_site_lisp folder.

Then in my .emacs I have:

(setq load-path (append load-path (list "~/emacs_site_lisp")))
(setq load-path (append load-path (list "~/emacs_site_lisp/color-theme-6.6.0")))

(require 'color-theme)
(color-theme-hober)

Note that ~ references your home directory if not familiar with *nix.

That should work as a minimal .emacs - odds are you'll have a lot more stuff in there soon as you try different things out & tweak different settings, plenty of example .emacs to be found... just search on google: filetype:emacs

Good Luck.