1 Building and Installing Emacs
2 on Windows NT/2K/XP and Windows 95/98/ME
4 Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007
5 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
6 See the end of the file for license conditions.
10 Here are the concise instructions for configuring and building the
11 native Windows binary of Emacs, for those who want to skip the
12 complex explanations and ``just do it'':
14 Do not use this recipe with Cygwin. For building on Cygwin,
15 use the normal installation instructions, ../INSTALL.
17 1. Change to the `nt' directory (the directory of this file):
21 2. Run configure.bat. From the COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE command prompt:
25 from a Unixy shell prompt:
29 command.com /c configure.bat
31 3. Run the Make utility suitable for your environment. If you build
32 with the Microsoft's Visual C compiler (but see notes about using
33 VC++ 8.0 and later below):
37 For the development environments based on GNU GCC (MinGW, MSYS,
38 Cygwin - but see notes about Cygwin make below), depending on how
39 Make is called, it could be:
49 (If you are building from CVS, say "make bootstrap" or "nmake
50 bootstrap" instead, and avoid using Cygwin make.)
52 With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have
53 Make execute several commands at once, like this:
55 gmake -j 2 XMFLAGS="-j 2"
57 The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make
58 on Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum
59 number of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows
60 up to 4 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and
61 up to 3 in each one of the recursive Make's.
63 4. Generate the Info manuals (only if you are building out of CVS, and
64 if you have makeinfo.exe installed):
68 (change "make" to "nmake" if you use MSVC).
70 5. Install the produced binaries:
76 If these short instructions somehow fail, read the rest of this
81 If you want to build a Cygwin port of Emacs, use the instructions in
82 the INSTALL file in the main Emacs directory (the parent of this
83 directory). These instructions are for building a native Windows
86 If you used WinZip to unpack the distribution, we suggest to
87 remove the files and unpack again with a different program!
88 WinZip is known to create some subtle and hard to debug problems,
89 such as converting files to DOS CR-LF format, not creating empty
90 directories, etc. We suggest to use djtarnt.exe from the GNU FTP
93 If you are building out of CVS, then some files in this directory
94 (.bat files, nmake.defs and makefile.w32-in) may need the line-ends
95 fixing first. The easiest way to do this and avoid future conflicts
96 is to run the following command in this (emacs/nt) directory:
100 Alternatively, use programs that convert end-of-line format, such as
101 dos2unix and unix2dos available from GnuWin32 or dtou and utod from
104 In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.CVS in the
105 parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of
106 "touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not
109 * Supported development environments
111 To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0, or
112 later up to 7.0, and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later
113 with MinGW and W32 API support and a port of GNU Make. You can use
114 the Cygwin ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and
115 libraries to build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least
116 since v1.3.3, include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral
119 Note that building Emacs with Visual Studio 2005 (VC++ 8.0) is not
120 supported at this time, due to changes introduced by Microsoft into
121 the libraries shipped with the compiler.
123 The rest of this file assumes you have a working development
124 environment. If you just installed such an environment, try
125 building a trivial C "Hello world" program, and see if it works. If
126 it doesn't work, resolve that problem first! If you use Microsoft
127 Visual Studio .NET 2003, don't forget to run the VCVARS32.BAT batch
128 file from the `Bin' subdirectory of the directory where you have
131 If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there
132 are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by
133 Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows
134 or sh.exe., a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, below is a list
135 of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether
136 they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port
137 of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin
138 will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of cygwin style
139 paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of
140 Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap",
141 for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you
142 decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
144 In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process,
145 at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the default Windows shell,
146 instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various problems. If you have
147 MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the use of cmd.exe
152 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
153 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
154 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
155 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
156 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
157 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
158 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
159 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
160 cygwin compiled make 3.80: okay[6] fails?[7]
161 cygwin compiled make 3.81: fails fails?[7]
162 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
163 mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay okay[7]
164 mingw32 compiled make 3.81: okay okay[8]
168 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
169 emacs source with text!=binary.
170 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
171 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
173 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
174 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
175 May work if building emacs without leim.
176 [6] need to uncomment 3 lines in nt/gmake.defs that invoke `cygpath'
177 (look for "cygpath" near line 85 of gmake.defs).
178 [7] not recommended; please report if you try this combination.
179 [8] tested only on Windows XP.
181 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
182 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
183 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless
184 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
185 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
186 in the previous paragraph.
188 You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These
189 and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several
192 * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
193 * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
194 * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
195 * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
197 If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or
198 Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is
199 because the native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the
200 Emacs build procedure tries very hard to support even such limited
201 shells, but as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on
202 Windows 9x, we cannot guarantee that it works without a more
205 Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
206 found at the Emacs Wiki:
208 http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
212 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
213 http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx
215 The second URL above includes instructions for building with MSVC,
216 as well as with MinGW, while the first URL covers only MinGW, but
217 has more details about it.
221 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
222 `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
223 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
224 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
225 options on the command line when invoking configure.
227 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
228 simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no
229 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
230 Do NOT use the --no-debug option to configure.bat unless you are
231 absolutely sure the produced binaries will never need to be run under
234 N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
235 is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
236 surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell.
238 You are encouraged to look at the file config.log which shows details
239 for failed tests, after configure.bat finishes. Any unexplained failure
240 should be investigated and perhaps reported as a bug (see the section
241 about reporting bugs in the file README in this directory and in the
244 * Optional image library support
246 In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can
247 handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png and jpeg (postscript is
248 currently unsupported on Windows). To build Emacs with support for
249 them, the corresponding headers must be in the include path when the
250 configure script is run. This can be setup using environment
251 variables, or by specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line
252 to configure.bat. The configure script will report whether it was
253 able to detect the headers. If the results of this testing appear to be
254 incorrect, please look for details in the file config.log: it will show
255 the failed test programs and compiler error messages that should explain
256 what is wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers
257 are missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.)
259 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
260 functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the
261 PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a
262 library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be
263 unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can
264 not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than
265 restarting. See the variable `image-library-alist' to configure the
266 expected names of the libraries.
268 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
269 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
270 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
271 is in the PATH or otherwise accesible and that the binaries are
272 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
274 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
275 the GnuWin32 project. These are built with MinGW, but they can be
276 used with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on
277 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html, under "How to Get
278 Images Support", for more details about installing image support
279 libraries. Note specifically that, due to some packaging snafus in
280 the GnuWin32-supplied image libraries, you will need to download
281 _source_ packages for some of the libraries in order to get the
282 header files necessary for building Emacs with image support.
286 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
287 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
288 GNU make. (If you are building out of CVS, say "make bootstrap" or
289 "nmake bootstrap" instead.)
291 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
292 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
293 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
294 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
295 until then we will just live with them.
297 With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have Make
298 execute several commands at once, like this:
300 gmake -j 4 XMFLAGS="-j 3"
302 The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make on
303 Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum number
304 of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows up to 4
305 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and up to 3 in
306 each one of the recursive Make's; you can use other numbers of jobs,
309 If you are building from CVS, the following commands will produce
310 the Info manuals (which are not part of the CVS repository):
316 Note that you will need makeinfo.exe (from the GNU Texinfo package)
317 in order for this command to succeed.
321 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
322 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
325 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
326 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
327 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
330 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
332 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
334 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
335 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
339 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
340 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API
341 headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
342 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
343 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
344 cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
345 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
347 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
348 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
349 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
350 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
351 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c. The W32 API
352 headers that come with Cygwin b20.1 are incomplete, and do not include
353 some definitions required by addsection.c, for instance. Also, older
354 releases of the W32 API headers from Anders Norlander contain a typo
355 in the definition of IMAGE_FIRST_SECTION in winnt.h, which
356 addsection.c relies on. Versions of w32api-xxx.zip from at least
357 1999-11-18 onwards are okay.
359 When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file
360 config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler
361 messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue,
362 please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from
365 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
366 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
367 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
368 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
370 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
371 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
373 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
376 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
377 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
379 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
384 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
385 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
386 compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC. (GDB for Windows
387 is available from the MinGW site, http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml.)
389 When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows
390 pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug
391 Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES
392 twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up
393 automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and
394 attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command,
395 where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the
396 Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and
397 only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to
398 the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal
401 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
402 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
403 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
404 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
405 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
406 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
407 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
409 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
410 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger,
411 Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a
412 readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB,
413 there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides
414 definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore,
415 the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.
417 The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger
418 via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should
419 be displayed in the console window that was opened when the
420 emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger
421 should be displayed in its "Debug" output window.
423 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
424 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, popup the QuickWatch
425 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
426 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
427 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
428 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
429 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
430 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
431 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
432 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
433 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
434 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
436 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
437 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
438 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
439 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
440 procedure and try using debug_print again.
442 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
443 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
444 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
445 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
446 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
447 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
448 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
452 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
454 GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
455 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
456 the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option)
459 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
460 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
461 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
462 GNU General Public License for more details.
464 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
465 along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the
466 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
467 Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.