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
5 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
6 See the end of the file for copying permissions.
10 Here are the concise instructions for configuring and building the
11 native Win32 binary of Emacs on Windows, for those who want to skip
12 the complex explanations and ``just do it'':
14 1. Change to the `nt' directory (the directory of this file):
18 2. Run configure.bat. From the COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE command prompt:
22 from a Unixy shell prompt:
26 command.com /c configure.bat
28 3. Run the Make utility suitable for your environment. If you build
29 with the Microsoft's Visual C compiler:
33 For the development environments based on GNU GCC (MinGW, MSYS,
34 Cygwin), depending on how Make is called, it could be:
42 (If you are building from CVS, say "make bootstrap" or "nmake
45 4. Generate the Info manuals (only if you are building out of CVS):
49 (change "make" to "nmake" if you use MSVC).
51 5. Install the produced binaries:
57 If these short instructions somehow fail, read the rest of this
62 If you used WinZip to unpack the distribution, we suggest to
63 remove the files and unpack again with a different program!
64 WinZip is known to create some subtle and hard to debug problems,
65 such as converting files to DOS CR-LF format, not creating empty
66 directories, etc. We suggest to use djtarnt.exe from the GNU FTP
69 If you are building out of CVS, then some files in this directory
70 (.bat files, nmake.defs and makefile.w32-in) may need the line-ends
71 fixing first. The easiest way to do this and avoid future conflicts
72 is to run the following command in this (emacs/nt) directory:
76 Alternatively, use programs that convert end-of-line format, such as
77 dos2unix and unix2dos available from GnuWin32 or dtou and utod from
80 In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.CVS in the
81 parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of
82 "touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not
85 * Supported development environments
87 To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0 or
88 later and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later with MinGW
89 and W32 API support and a port of GNU Make. You can use the Cygwin
90 ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and libraries to
91 build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least since v1.3.3,
92 include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral part).
94 The rest of this file assumes you have a working development
95 environment. If you just installed such an environment, try
96 building a trivial C "Hello world" program, and see if it works. If
97 it doesn't work, resolve that problem first!
99 If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there
100 are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by
101 Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows
102 or sh.exe., a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, here is a list
103 of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether
104 they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port
105 of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin
106 will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of cygwin style
107 paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of
108 Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap",
109 for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you
110 decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
112 In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process,
113 at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the default Windows shell,
114 instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various problems. If you have
115 MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the use of cmd.exe
120 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
121 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
122 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
123 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
124 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
125 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
126 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
127 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
128 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
129 mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay unknown[6]
130 mingw32 compiled make 3.81: okay okay[7]
134 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
135 emacs source with text!=binary.
136 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
137 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
139 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
140 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
141 May work if building emacs without leim.
142 [6] please report if you try this combination.
144 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
145 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
146 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless
147 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
148 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
149 in the previous paragraph.
151 You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These
152 and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several
155 * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
156 * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
157 * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
158 * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
160 If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or
161 Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is
162 because the native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the
163 Emacs build procedure tries very hard to support even such limited
164 shells, but as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on
165 Windows 9x, we cannot guarantee that it works without a more
168 Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
169 found at the Emacs Wiki:
171 http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
175 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
179 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
180 `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
181 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
182 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
183 options on the command line when invoking configure.
185 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
186 simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no
187 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
189 N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
190 is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
191 surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell.
193 You are encouraged to look at the file config.log which shows details
194 for failed tests, after configure.bat finishes. Any unexplained failure
195 should be investigated and perhaps reported as a bug (see the section
196 about reporting bugs in the file README in this directory and in the
199 * Optional image library support
201 In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can
202 handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png and jpeg (postscript is
203 currently unsupported on Windows). To build Emacs with support for
204 them, the corresponding headers must be in the include path when the
205 configure script is run. This can be setup using environment
206 variables, or by specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line
207 to configure.bat. The configure script will report whether it was
208 able to detect the headers. If the results of this testing appear to be
209 incorrect, please look for details in the file config.log: it will show
210 the failed test programs and compiler error messages that should explain
211 what is wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers
212 are missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.)
214 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
215 functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the
216 PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a
217 library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be
218 unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can
219 not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than
220 restarting. See the variable `image-library-alist' to configure the
221 expected names of the libraries.
223 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
224 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
225 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
226 is in the PATH or otherwise accesible and that the binaries are
227 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
229 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
230 the GnuWin32 project. These are built with MinGW, but they can be
231 used with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on
232 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html for more details about
233 installing image support libraries.
237 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
238 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
239 GNU make. (If you are building out of CVS, say "make bootstrap" or
240 "nmake bootstrap" instead.)
242 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
243 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
244 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
245 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
246 until then we will just live with them.
248 If you are building from CVS, the following commands will produce
249 the Info manuals (which are not part of the CVS repository):
257 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
258 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
261 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
262 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
263 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
266 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
268 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
270 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
271 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
275 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
276 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API
277 headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
278 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
279 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
280 cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
281 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
283 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
284 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
285 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
286 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
287 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c. The W32 API
288 headers that come with Cygwin b20.1 are incomplete, and do not include
289 some definitions required by addsection.c, for instance. Also, older
290 releases of the W32 API headers from Anders Norlander contain a typo
291 in the definition of IMAGE_FIRST_SECTION in winnt.h, which
292 addsection.c relies on. Versions of w32api-xxx.zip from at least
293 1999-11-18 onwards are okay.
295 When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file
296 config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler
297 messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue,
298 please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from
301 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
302 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
303 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
304 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
306 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
307 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
309 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
312 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
313 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
315 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
320 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
321 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
322 compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC.
324 When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows
325 pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug
326 Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES
327 twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up
328 automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and
329 attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command,
330 where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the
331 Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and
332 only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to
333 the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal
336 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
337 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
338 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
339 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
340 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
341 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
342 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
344 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
345 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger,
346 Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a
347 readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB,
348 there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides
349 definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore,
350 the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.
352 The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger
353 via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should
354 be displayed in the console window that was opened when the
355 emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger
356 should be displayed in its "Debug" output window.
358 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
359 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, popup the QuickWatch
360 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
361 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
362 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
363 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
364 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
365 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
366 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
367 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
368 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
369 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
371 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
372 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
373 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
374 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
375 procedure and try using debug_print again.
377 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
378 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
379 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
380 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
381 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
382 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
383 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
388 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
389 of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the
390 copyright notice and permission notice are preserved,
391 and that the distributor grants the recipient permission
392 for further redistribution as permitted by this notice.
394 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
395 of this document, or of portions of it,
396 under the above conditions, provided also that they
397 carry prominent notices stating who last changed them,
398 and that any new or changed statements about the activities
399 of the Free Software Foundation are approved by the Foundation.