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, and
46 if you have makeinfo.exe installed):
50 (change "make" to "nmake" if you use MSVC).
52 5. Install the produced binaries:
58 If these short instructions somehow fail, read the rest of this
63 If you used WinZip to unpack the distribution, we suggest to
64 remove the files and unpack again with a different program!
65 WinZip is known to create some subtle and hard to debug problems,
66 such as converting files to DOS CR-LF format, not creating empty
67 directories, etc. We suggest to use djtarnt.exe from the GNU FTP
70 If you are building out of CVS, then some files in this directory
71 (.bat files, nmake.defs and makefile.w32-in) may need the line-ends
72 fixing first. The easiest way to do this and avoid future conflicts
73 is to run the following command in this (emacs/nt) directory:
77 Alternatively, use programs that convert end-of-line format, such as
78 dos2unix and unix2dos available from GnuWin32 or dtou and utod from
81 In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.CVS in the
82 parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of
83 "touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not
86 * Supported development environments
88 To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0 or
89 later and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later with MinGW
90 and W32 API support and a port of GNU Make. You can use the Cygwin
91 ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and libraries to
92 build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least since v1.3.3,
93 include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral part).
95 The rest of this file assumes you have a working development
96 environment. If you just installed such an environment, try
97 building a trivial C "Hello world" program, and see if it works. If
98 it doesn't work, resolve that problem first!
100 If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there
101 are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by
102 Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows
103 or sh.exe., a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, here is a list
104 of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether
105 they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port
106 of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin
107 will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of cygwin style
108 paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of
109 Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap",
110 for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you
111 decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
113 In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process,
114 at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the default Windows shell,
115 instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various problems. If you have
116 MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the use of cmd.exe
121 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
122 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
123 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
124 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
125 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
126 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
127 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
128 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
129 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
130 mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay unknown[6]
131 mingw32 compiled make 3.81: okay okay[7]
135 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
136 emacs source with text!=binary.
137 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
138 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
140 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
141 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
142 May work if building emacs without leim.
143 [6] please report if you try this combination.
144 [7] tested only on Windows XP.
146 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
147 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
148 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless
149 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
150 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
151 in the previous paragraph.
153 You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These
154 and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several
157 * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
158 * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
159 * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
160 * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
162 If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or
163 Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is
164 because the native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the
165 Emacs build procedure tries very hard to support even such limited
166 shells, but as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on
167 Windows 9x, we cannot guarantee that it works without a more
170 Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
171 found at the Emacs Wiki:
173 http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
177 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
181 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
182 `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
183 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
184 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
185 options on the command line when invoking configure.
187 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
188 simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no
189 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
191 N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
192 is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
193 surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell.
195 You are encouraged to look at the file config.log which shows details
196 for failed tests, after configure.bat finishes. Any unexplained failure
197 should be investigated and perhaps reported as a bug (see the section
198 about reporting bugs in the file README in this directory and in the
201 * Optional image library support
203 In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can
204 handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png and jpeg (postscript is
205 currently unsupported on Windows). To build Emacs with support for
206 them, the corresponding headers must be in the include path when the
207 configure script is run. This can be setup using environment
208 variables, or by specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line
209 to configure.bat. The configure script will report whether it was
210 able to detect the headers. If the results of this testing appear to be
211 incorrect, please look for details in the file config.log: it will show
212 the failed test programs and compiler error messages that should explain
213 what is wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers
214 are missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.)
216 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
217 functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the
218 PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a
219 library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be
220 unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can
221 not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than
222 restarting. See the variable `image-library-alist' to configure the
223 expected names of the libraries.
225 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
226 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
227 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
228 is in the PATH or otherwise accesible and that the binaries are
229 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
231 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
232 the GnuWin32 project. These are built with MinGW, but they can be
233 used with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on
234 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html for more details about
235 installing image support libraries.
239 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
240 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
241 GNU make. (If you are building out of CVS, say "make bootstrap" or
242 "nmake bootstrap" instead.)
244 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
245 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
246 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
247 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
248 until then we will just live with them.
250 If you are building from CVS, the following commands will produce
251 the Info manuals (which are not part of the CVS repository):
257 Note that you will need makeinfo.exe (from the GNU Texinfo package)
258 in order for this command to succeed.
262 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
263 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
266 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
267 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
268 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
271 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
273 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
275 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
276 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
280 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
281 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API
282 headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
283 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
284 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
285 cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
286 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
288 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
289 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
290 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
291 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
292 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c. The W32 API
293 headers that come with Cygwin b20.1 are incomplete, and do not include
294 some definitions required by addsection.c, for instance. Also, older
295 releases of the W32 API headers from Anders Norlander contain a typo
296 in the definition of IMAGE_FIRST_SECTION in winnt.h, which
297 addsection.c relies on. Versions of w32api-xxx.zip from at least
298 1999-11-18 onwards are okay.
300 When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file
301 config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler
302 messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue,
303 please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from
306 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
307 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
308 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
309 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
311 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
312 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
314 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
317 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
318 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
320 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
325 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
326 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
327 compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC.
329 When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows
330 pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug
331 Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES
332 twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up
333 automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and
334 attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command,
335 where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the
336 Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and
337 only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to
338 the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal
341 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
342 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
343 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
344 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
345 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
346 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
347 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
349 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
350 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger,
351 Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a
352 readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB,
353 there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides
354 definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore,
355 the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.
357 The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger
358 via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should
359 be displayed in the console window that was opened when the
360 emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger
361 should be displayed in its "Debug" output window.
363 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
364 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, popup the QuickWatch
365 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
366 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
367 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
368 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
369 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
370 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
371 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
372 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
373 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
374 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
376 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
377 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
378 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
379 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
380 procedure and try using debug_print again.
382 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
383 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
384 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
385 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
386 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
387 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
388 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
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399 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
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401 under the above conditions, provided also that they
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