1 Building and Installing Emacs on Windows
2 (from 95 to 7 and beyond)
4 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5 See the end of the file for license conditions.
7 *** This method of building Emacs is no longer supported. ***
8 It may fail to produce a correctly working Emacs.
9 Do not report bugs associated with this build method.
10 Instead, follow the new instructions in INSTALL.
14 Here are the concise instructions for configuring and building the
15 native Windows binary of Emacs, for those who want to skip the
16 complex explanations and ``just do it'':
18 Do not use this recipe with Cygwin. For building on Cygwin,
19 use the normal installation instructions, ../INSTALL.
21 Do not use these instructions with MSYS environment. For building
22 the native Windows binary with MinGW and MSYS, follow the
23 instructions in the file INSTALL in this directory.
25 For building without MSYS, if you have a Cygwin or MSYS port of Bash
26 on your Path, you will be better off removing it from PATH. (For
27 details, search for "MSYS sh.exe" below.)
29 1. Change to the `nt' directory (the directory of this file):
35 2a.If you use MSVC, set up the build environment by running the
36 SetEnv.cmd batch file from the appropriate SDK directory. (Skip
37 this step if you are using MinGW.) For example:
39 "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin\SetEnv.cmd" /x86 /Debug
41 if you are going to compile a debug version, or
43 "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin\SetEnv.cmd" /x86 /Release
45 if you are going to compile an optimized version.
47 2b.From the COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE command prompt type:
51 From a Unixy shell prompt:
55 command.com /c configure.bat
57 3. Run the Make utility suitable for your environment. If you build
58 with the Microsoft's Visual C compiler:
62 For the development environments based on GNU GCC (MinGW, MSYS,
63 Cygwin - but see notes about Cygwin make below), depending on how
64 Make is called, it could be:
74 (If you are building from Bazaar, say "make bootstrap" or "nmake
75 bootstrap" instead, and avoid using Cygwin make.)
77 With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have
78 Make execute several commands at once, like this:
82 (With versions of GNU Make before 3.82, you need also set the
83 XMFLAGS variable, like this:
85 gmake -j 2 XMFLAGS="-j 2"
87 The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of version
88 3.82 and older of GNU Make on Windows, whereby recursive Make
89 invocations reset the maximum number of simultaneous commands to
90 1. The above command allows up to 4 simultaneous commands at
91 once in the top-level Make, and up to 3 in each one of the
94 4. Generate the Info manuals (only if you are building out of Bazaar,
95 and if you have makeinfo.exe installed):
99 (change "make" to "nmake" if you use MSVC).
101 5. Install the produced binaries:
107 If these short instructions somehow fail, read the rest of this
112 If you want to build a Cygwin port of Emacs, use the instructions in
113 the INSTALL file in the main Emacs directory (the parent of this
114 directory). These instructions are for building a native Windows
117 If you used WinZip to unpack the distribution, we suggest to
118 remove the files and unpack again with a different program!
119 WinZip is known to create some subtle and hard to debug problems,
120 such as converting files to DOS CR-LF format, not creating empty
121 directories, etc. We suggest to use djtarnt.exe from the GNU FTP
122 site. For modern formats, such as .tar.xz, we suggest bsdtar.exe
123 from the libarchive package; its precompiled Windows binaries are
124 available from this site:
126 http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/
128 In addition to this file, if you build a development snapshot, you
129 should also read INSTALL.BZR in the parent directory.
131 * Supported development environments
133 To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0, or
134 later and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later with MinGW
135 and Windows API support and a port of GNU Make. You can use the Cygwin
136 ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and libraries to
137 build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least since v1.3.3,
138 include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral part).
140 The rest of this file assumes you have a working development
141 environment. If you just installed such an environment, try
142 building a trivial C "Hello world" program, and see if it works. If
143 it doesn't work, resolve that problem first! If you use Microsoft
144 Visual Studio .NET 2003, don't forget to run the VCVARS32.BAT batch
145 file from the `Bin' subdirectory of the directory where you have
146 installed VS.NET. With other versions of MSVC, run the SetEnv.cmd
147 batch file from the `Bin' subdirectory of the directory where you
148 have the SDK installed.
150 If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there
151 are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by
152 Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows
153 or sh.exe, a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, below is a list
154 of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether
155 they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port
156 of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin
157 will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of Cygwin style
158 paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of
159 Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap",
160 for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you
161 decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
163 In addition, using 4NT or TCC as your shell is known to fail the
164 build process, at least since 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the
165 default Windows shell, instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause
166 various problems, e.g., it is known to cause failures in commands
167 like "cmd /c FOO" in the Makefiles, because it thinks "/c" is a
168 Unix-style file name that needs conversion to the Windows format.
169 If you have MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the
170 use of cmd.exe instead of the MSYS sh.exe.
174 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
175 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
176 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
177 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
178 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
179 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
180 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
181 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
182 cygwin compiled make 3.80: okay[6] fails?[7]
183 cygwin compiled make 3.81: fails fails?[7]
184 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
185 mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay okay[7]
186 mingw32 compiled make 3.81: okay okay[8]
190 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
191 emacs source with text!=binary.
192 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
193 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
195 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
196 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
197 May work if building emacs without leim.
198 [6] need to uncomment 3 lines in nt/gmake.defs that invoke `cygpath'
199 (look for "cygpath" near line 85 of gmake.defs).
200 [7] not recommended; please report if you try this combination.
201 [8] tested only on Windows XP.
203 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
204 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
205 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behavior. Unless
206 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
207 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
208 in the previous paragraph.
210 You will also need a copy of the POSIX cp, rm and mv programs. These
211 and other useful POSIX utilities can be obtained from one of several
214 * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
215 * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
216 * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
217 * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
219 If you build Emacs on 16-bit versions of Windows (9X or ME), we
220 suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is because the
221 native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the Emacs build
222 procedure tries very hard to support even such limited shells, but
223 as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on Windows 9X, we
224 cannot guarantee that it works without a more powerful shell.
226 Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
227 found at the Emacs Wiki:
229 http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
233 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
234 http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx
236 Both of those pages were written before Emacs switched from CVS to
237 Bazaar, but the parts about building Emacs still apply in Bazaar.
238 The second URL has instructions for building with MSVC, as well as
239 with MinGW, while the first URL covers only MinGW, but has more
244 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
245 `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
246 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
247 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
248 options on the command line when invoking configure.
250 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
251 simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no
252 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
253 Do NOT use the --no-debug option to configure.bat unless you are
254 absolutely sure the produced binaries will never need to be run under
257 Because of limitations of the stock Windows command shells, special
258 care is needed to pass some characters in the arguments of the
259 --cflags and --ldflags options. Backslashes should not be used in
260 file names passed to the compiler and linker via these options. Use
261 forward slashes instead. If the arguments to these two options
262 include the `=' character, like when passing a -DFOO=bar preprocessor
263 option, the argument with the `=' character should be enclosed in
266 configure --cflags "-DFOO=bar"
268 Support for options that include the `=' character require "command
269 extensions" to be enabled. (They are enabled by default, but your
270 system administrator could have changed that. See "cmd /?" for
271 details.) If command extensions are disabled, a warning message might
272 be displayed informing you that "using parameters that include the =
273 character by enclosing them in quotes will not be supported."
275 You may also use the --cflags and --ldflags options to pass
276 additional parameters to the compiler and linker, respectively; they
277 are frequently used to pass -I and -L flags to specify supplementary
278 include and library directories. If a directory name includes
279 spaces, you will need to enclose it in quotes, as follows
280 -I"C:/Program Files/GnuTLS-2.10.1/include". Note that only the
281 directory name is enclosed in quotes, not the entire argument. Also
282 note that this functionality is only supported if command extensions
283 are available. If command extensions are disabled and you attempt to
284 use this functionality you may see the following warning message
285 "Error in --cflags argument: ... Backslashes and quotes cannot be
286 used with --cflags. Please use forward slashes for filenames and
287 paths (e.g. when passing directories to -I)."
289 N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
290 is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
291 suppressed because of limitations in the Windows 9X command.com shell.
293 You are encouraged to look at the file config.log which shows details
294 for failed tests, after configure.bat finishes. Any unexplained failure
295 should be investigated and perhaps reported as a bug (see the section
296 about reporting bugs in the file README in this directory and in the
299 * Optional image library support
301 In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can
302 handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png, jpeg and experimental
305 To build Emacs with support for them, the corresponding headers must
306 be in the include path when the configure script is run. This can
307 be setup using environment variables, or by specifying --cflags
308 -I... options on the command-line to configure.bat. The configure
309 script will report whether it was able to detect the headers. If
310 the results of this testing appear to be incorrect, please look for
311 details in the file config.log: it will show the failed test
312 programs and compiler error messages that should explain what is
313 wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers are
314 missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.)
316 Note that any file path passed to the compiler or linker must use
317 forward slashes; using backslashes will cause compiler warnings or
318 errors about unrecognized escape sequences.
320 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
321 functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the
322 PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a
323 library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be
324 unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can
325 not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than
326 restarting. See the variable `dynamic-library-alist' to configure the
327 expected names of the libraries.
329 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
330 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
331 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
332 is in the PATH or otherwise accessible and that the binaries are
333 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
335 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
336 the GnuWin32 project. PNG, JPEG and TIFF libraries are also
337 included with GTK, which is installed along with other Free Software
338 that requires it. These are built with MinGW, but they can be used
339 with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on
340 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html, under "How to Get
341 Images Support", for more details about installing image support
342 libraries. Note specifically that, due to some packaging snafus in
343 the GnuWin32-supplied image libraries, you will need to download
344 _source_ packages for some of the libraries in order to get the
345 header files necessary for building Emacs with image support.
347 If GTK 2.0 is installed, addpm will arrange for its image libraries
348 to be on the DLL search path for Emacs.
350 For PNG images, we recommend to use versions 1.4.x and later of
351 libpng, because previous versions had security issues. You can find
352 precompiled libraries and headers on the GTK download page for
353 Windows (http://www.gtk.org/download/win32.php).
355 Versions 1.4.0 and later of libpng are binary incompatible with
356 earlier versions, so Emacs will only look for libpng libraries which
357 are compatible with the version it was compiled against. That
358 version is given by the value of the Lisp variable `libpng-version';
359 e.g., 10403 means version 1.4.3. The variable `dynamic-library-alist'
360 is automatically set to name only those DLL names that are known to
361 be compatible with the version given by `libpng-version'. If PNG
362 support does not work for you even though you have the support DLL
363 installed, check the name of the installed DLL against
364 `dynamic-library-alist' and the value of `libpng-version', and
365 download compatible DLLs if needed.
367 * Optional GnuTLS support
369 If configure.bat finds the gnutls/gnutls.h file in the include path,
370 Emacs is built with GnuTLS support by default; to avoid that you can
371 pass the argument --without-gnutls.
373 In order to support GnuTLS at runtime, a GnuTLS-enabled Emacs must
374 be able to find the relevant DLLs during startup; failure to do so
375 is not an error, but GnuTLS won't be available to the running
378 You can get pre-built binaries (including any required DLL and the
379 header files) at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/.
381 * Optional libxml2 support
383 If configure.bat finds the libxml/HTMLparser.h file in the include path,
384 Emacs is built with libxml2 support by default; to avoid that you can
385 pass the argument --without-libxml2.
387 In order to support libxml2 at runtime, a libxml2-enabled Emacs must
388 be able to find the relevant DLLs during startup; failure to do so
389 is not an error, but libxml2 features won't be available to the
392 One place where you can get pre-built Windows binaries of libxml2
393 (including any required DLL and the header files) is here:
395 http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/
397 To compile Emacs with libxml2 from that site, you will need to pass
398 the "--cflags -I/path/to/include/libxml2" option to configure.bat,
399 because libxml2 header files are installed in the include/libxml2
400 subdirectory of the directory where you unzip the binary
401 distribution. Other binary distributions might use other
402 directories, although include/libxml2 is the canonical place where
403 libxml2 headers are installed on Posix platforms.
405 You will also need to install the libiconv "development" tarball,
406 because the libiconv headers need to be available to the compiler
407 when you compile with libxml2 support. A MinGW port of libiconv can
408 be found on the MinGW site:
410 http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MinGW/Base/libiconv/
412 You need the libiconv-X.Y.Z-N-mingw32-dev.tar.lzma tarball from that
415 * Experimental SVG support
417 SVG support is currently experimental, and not built by default.
418 Specify --with-svg and ensure you have all the dependencies in your
419 include path. Unless you have built a minimalist librsvg yourself
420 (untested), librsvg depends on a significant chunk of GTK+ to build,
421 plus a few Gnome libraries, libxml2, libbz2 and zlib at runtime. The
422 easiest way to obtain the dependencies required for building is to
423 download a pre-bundled GTK+ development environment for Windows.
424 GTK puts its header files all over the place, so you will need to
425 run pkgconfig to list the include path you will need (either passed
426 to configure.bat as --cflags options, or set in the environment).
428 To use librsvg at runtime, ensure that librsvg and its dependencies
429 are on your PATH. If you didn't build librsvg yourself, you will
430 need to check with where you downloaded it from for the
431 dependencies, as there are different build options. If it is a
432 short list, then it most likely only lists the immediate
433 dependencies of librsvg, but the dependencies themselves have
434 dependencies - so don't download individual libraries from GTK+,
435 download and install the whole thing. If you think you've got all
436 the dependencies and SVG support is still not working, check your
437 PATH for other libraries that shadow the ones you downloaded.
438 Libraries of the same name from different sources may not be
439 compatible, this problem was encountered with libbzip2 from GnuWin32
440 with libcroco from gnome.org.
442 If you can see etc/images/splash.svg, then you have managed to get
443 SVG support working. Congratulations for making it through DLL hell
444 to this point. You'll probably find that some SVG images crash
445 Emacs. Problems have been observed in some images that contain
446 text, they seem to be a problem in the Windows port of Pango, or
447 maybe a problem with the way Cairo or librsvg is using it that
448 doesn't show up on other platforms.
450 * Optional extra runtime checks
452 The configure.bat option --enable-checking builds Emacs with some
453 optional extra runtime checks and assertions enabled. This may be
454 useful for debugging.
456 * Optional extra libraries
458 You can pass --lib LIBNAME option to configure.bat to cause Emacs to
459 link with the specified library. You can use this option more than once.
463 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
464 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
465 GNU make. (If you are building out of Bazaar, say "make bootstrap" or
466 "nmake bootstrap" instead.)
468 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
469 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
470 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
471 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
472 until then we will just live with them.
474 With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have Make
475 execute several commands at once, like this:
477 gmake -j 4 XMFLAGS="-j 3"
479 The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make on
480 Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum number
481 of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows up to 4
482 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and up to 3 in
483 each one of the recursive Make's; you can use other numbers of jobs,
486 If you are building from Bazaar, the following commands will produce
487 the Info manuals (which are not part of the Bazaar sources):
493 Note that you will need makeinfo.exe (from the GNU Texinfo package)
494 in order for this command to succeed.
498 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
499 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
502 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
503 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
504 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
507 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
509 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
511 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
512 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
516 The following make targets may be used by users building the source
517 distribution, or users who have checked out of Bazaar after
518 an initial bootstrapping.
521 Builds Emacs from the available sources and pre-compiled lisp files.
524 Installs programs to the bin directory, and runs addpm to create
528 Removes object and executable files produced by the build process in
529 the current configuration. After make clean, you can rebuild with
530 the same configuration using make.
533 In addition to the files removed by make clean, this also removes
534 Makefiles and other generated files to get back to the state of a
535 freshly unpacked source distribution. Note that this will not remove
536 installed files, or the results of builds performed with different
537 compiler or optimization options than the current configuration.
538 After make distclean, it is necessary to run configure.bat followed
542 Removes object and executable files that may have been created by
543 previous builds with different configure options, in addition to
544 the files produced by the current configuration.
547 Removes the installed files in the bin subdirectory in addition to
548 the files removed by make cleanall.
551 Builds Emacs from the available sources and pre-compiled lisp files.
552 Packages Emacs binaries as full distribution and barebin distribution.
554 The following targets are intended only for use with the Bazaar sources.
557 Creates a temporary emacs binary with lisp source files and
558 uses it to compile the lisp files. Once the lisp files are built,
559 emacs is redumped with the compiled lisp.
562 Recompiles any changed lisp files after an update. This saves
563 doing a full bootstrap after every update. If this or a subsequent
564 make fail, you probably need to perform a full bootstrap, though
565 running this target multiple times may eventually sort out the
568 make maintainer-clean
569 Removes everything that can be recreated, including compiled lisp
570 files, to get back to the state of a fresh Bazaar tree. After make
571 maintainer-clean, it is necessary to run configure.bat and make
572 bootstrap to rebuild. Occasionally it may be necessary to run this
573 target after an update.
575 * Creating binary distributions
577 Binary distributions (full and barebin distributions) can be
578 automatically built and packaged from source tarballs or a bzr
581 When building Emacs binary distributions, the --distfiles argument
582 to configure.bat specifies files to be included in the bin directory
583 of the binary distributions. This is intended for libraries that are
584 not built as part of Emacs, e.g. image libraries.
586 For example, specifying
588 --distfiles D:\distfiles\libXpm.dll
590 results in libXpm.dll being copied from D:\distfiles to the
591 bin directory before packaging starts.
593 Multiple files can be specified using multiple --distfiles arguments:
595 --distfiles D:\distfiles\libXpm.dll --distfiles C:\jpeglib\jpeg.dll
597 For packaging the binary distributions, the 'dist' make target uses
598 7-Zip (http://www.7-zip.org), which must be installed and available
604 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
605 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or Windows API
606 headers. Additionally, Cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
607 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
608 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
609 Cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
610 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
612 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
613 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
614 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
615 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
616 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c.
617 Older versions of the Windows API headers that come with Cygwin and MinGW
618 may be missing some definitions required by Emacs, or broken in other
619 ways. In particular, uniscribe APIs were added to MinGW CVS only on
620 2006-03-26, so releases from before then cannot be used.
622 When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file
623 config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler
624 messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue,
625 please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from
628 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
629 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
630 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
631 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
633 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
634 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
636 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
639 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
640 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
642 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
647 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
648 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
649 compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC. (GDB for Windows
650 is available from the MinGW site, http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml.)
652 When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows
653 pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug
654 Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES
655 twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up
656 automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and
657 attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command,
658 where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the
659 Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and
660 only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to
661 the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal
664 The single most important thing to find out when Emacs aborts or
665 crashes is where did that happen in the Emacs code. This is called
668 Emacs on Windows uses more than one thread. When Emacs aborts due
669 to a fatal error, the current thread may not be the application
670 thread running Emacs code. Therefore, to produce a meaningful
671 backtrace from a debugger, you need to instruct it to show the
672 backtrace for every thread. With GDB, you do it like this:
674 (gdb) thread apply all backtrace
676 To run Emacs under a debugger to begin with, simply start it from
677 the debugger. With GDB, chdir to the `src' directory (if you have
678 the source tree) or to a directory with the `.gdbinit' file (if you
679 don't have the source tree), and type these commands:
681 C:\whatever\src> gdb x:\path\to\emacs.exe
682 (gdb) run <ARGUMENTS TO EMACS>
684 Thereafter, use Emacs as usual; you can minimize the debugger
685 window, if you like. The debugger will take control if and when
688 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
689 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
690 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
691 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
692 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
693 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
694 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
696 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
697 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger,
698 Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a
699 readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB,
700 there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides
701 definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore,
702 the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.
704 The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger
705 via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should
706 be displayed in the console window that was opened when the
707 emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger
708 should be displayed in its "Debug" output window.
710 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
711 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, pop up the QuickWatch
712 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
713 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
714 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
715 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
716 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
717 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
718 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
719 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
720 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
721 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
723 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
724 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
725 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
726 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
727 procedure and try using debug_print again.
729 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
730 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
731 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
732 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
733 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
734 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
735 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
739 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
741 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
742 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
743 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
744 (at your option) any later version.
746 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
747 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
748 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
749 GNU General Public License for more details.
751 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
752 along with GNU Emacs. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.