Building and Installing Emacs
on Windows NT/2K/XP and Windows 95/98/ME
- Copyright (c) 2001,2004,2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+ Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006
+ Free Software Foundation, Inc.
See the end of the file for copying permissions.
+* For the impatient
+
+ Here are the concise instructions for configuring and building the
+ native Win32 binary of Emacs on Windows, for those who want to skip
+ the complex explanations and ``just do it'':
+
+ 1. Change to the `nt' directory (the directory of this file):
+
+ cd nt
+
+ 2. Run configure.bat. From the COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE command prompt:
+
+ configure
+
+ from a Unixy shell prompt:
+
+ cmd /c configure.bat
+ or
+ command.com /c configure.bat
+
+ 3. Run the Make utility suitable for your environment. If you build
+ with the Microsoft's Visual C compiler:
+
+ nmake
+
+ For the development environments based on GNU GCC (MinGW, MSYS,
+ Cygwin), depending on how Make is called, it could be:
+
+ make
+ or
+ gnumake
+ or
+ gmake
+
+ (If you are building from CVS, say "make bootstrap" or "nmake
+ bootstrap" instead.)
+
+ 4. Generate the Info manuals (only if you are building out of CVS):
+
+ make info
+
+ (change "make" to "nmake" if you use MSVC).
+
+ 5. Install the produced binaries:
+
+ make install
+
+ That's it!
+
+ If these short instructions somehow fail, read the rest of this
+ file.
+
+* Preliminaries
+
If you used WinZip to unpack the distribution, we suggest to
remove the files and unpack again with a different program!
WinZip is known to create some subtle and hard to debug problems,
cvs update -kb
- (WARNING: Do NOT use this suggestion if you have write access to the
- Emacs CVS tree and intend to commit changes to CVS. This is because -kb
- is sticky: it will be used in all future CVS operations on the files you
- check out like this.) Alternatively, use programs that convert
- end-of-line format, such as dos2unix and unix2dos available from
- GnuWin32 or dtou and utod from the DJGPP project.
+ Alternatively, use programs that convert end-of-line format, such as
+ dos2unix and unix2dos available from GnuWin32 or dtou and utod from
+ the DJGPP project.
In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.CVS in the
parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of
"touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not
yet exist.
+* Supported development environments
+
To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0 or
later and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later with MinGW
- and W32 API support and a port of GNU make. You can use the Cygwin
+ and W32 API support and a port of GNU Make. You can use the Cygwin
ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and libraries to
build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least since v1.3.3,
include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral part).
- Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
- tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
- Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless
- you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
- like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
- in the previous paragraph.
-
- You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These
- and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several
- projects:
-
- * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
- * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
- * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
- * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
-
- If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or
- Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash.
-
- Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
- found at the Emacs Wiki:
-
- http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
-
- and at this URL:
-
- http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
-
- For reference, here is a list of which builds of GNU make are known
- to work or not, and whether they work in the presence and/or absence
- of sh.exe, the Cygwin port of Bash. Note that any version of make
- that is compiled with Cygwin will only work with Cygwin tools, due to
- the use of cygwin style paths. This means Cygwin make is unsuitable
- for building parts of Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and
- "make bootstrap", for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section
- below if you decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
+ The rest of this file assumes you have a working development
+ environment. If you just installed such an environment, try
+ building a trivial C "Hello world" program, and see if it works. If
+ it doesn't work, resolve that problem first!
+
+ If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there
+ are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by
+ Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows
+ or sh.exe., a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, here is a list
+ of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether
+ they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port
+ of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin
+ will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of cygwin style
+ paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of
+ Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap",
+ for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you
+ decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process,
- at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use cmd.exe, the default NT shell,
+ at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the default Windows shell,
instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various problems. If you have
MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the use of cmd.exe
instead of sh.exe.
May work if building emacs without leim.
[6] please report if you try this combination.
+ Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
+ tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
+ Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless
+ you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
+ like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
+ in the previous paragraph.
+
+ You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These
+ and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several
+ projects:
+
+ * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
+ * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
+ * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
+ * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
+
+ If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or
+ Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is
+ because the native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the
+ Emacs build procedure tries very hard to support even such limited
+ shells, but as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on
+ Windows 9x, we cannot guarantee that it works without a more
+ powerful shell.
+
+ Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
+ found at the Emacs Wiki:
+
+ http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
+
+ and at this URL:
+
+ http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
+
* Configuring
Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
- nt subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
+ `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
options on the command line when invoking configure.
To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
- simply change to the nt subdirectory and run `configure' with no
+ simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no
options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
the GnuWin32 project. These are built with MinGW, but they can be
used with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on
- http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html for more details about
+ http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html for more details about
installing image support libraries.
* Building
After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
- GNU make.
+ GNU make. (If you are building out of CVS, say "make bootstrap" or
+ "nmake bootstrap" instead.)
As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
until then we will just live with them.
+ If you are building from CVS, the following commands will produce
+ the Info manuals (which are not part of the CVS repository):
+
+ make info
+ or
+ nmake info
+
* Installing
To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
- compiled with MSVC, or gdb if compiled with gcc.
+ compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC.
+
+ When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows
+ pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug
+ Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES
+ twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up
+ automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and
+ attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command,
+ where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the
+ Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and
+ only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to
+ the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal
+ error.
Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
- Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in the MSVC
- debugger, Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that
- prints out a readable representation of a Lisp_Object. (If you are
- using gdb, there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which
- provides definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. The
- following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.) The output
- from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger via the
- OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should be
- displayed in the console window that was opened when the emacs.exe
- executable was started. The output sent to the debugger should be
- displayed in its "Debug" output window.
+ Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger,
+ Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a
+ readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB,
+ there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides
+ definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore,
+ the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.
+
+ The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger
+ via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should
+ be displayed in the console window that was opened when the
+ emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger
+ should be displayed in its "Debug" output window.
When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, popup the QuickWatch