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!
128 If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there
129 are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by
130 Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows
131 or sh.exe., a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, below is a list
132 of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether
133 they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port
134 of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin
135 will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of cygwin style
136 paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of
137 Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap",
138 for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you
139 decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
141 In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process,
142 at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the default Windows shell,
143 instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various problems. If you have
144 MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the use of cmd.exe
149 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
150 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
151 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
152 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
153 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
154 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
155 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
156 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
157 cygwin compiled make 3.80: fails?[6] fails?[6]
158 cygwin compiled make 3.81: fails fails?[6]
159 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
160 mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay okay[6]
161 mingw32 compiled make 3.81: okay okay[7]
165 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
166 emacs source with text!=binary.
167 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
168 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
170 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
171 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
172 May work if building emacs without leim.
173 [6] not recommended; please report if you try this combination.
174 [7] tested only on Windows XP.
176 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
177 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
178 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless
179 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
180 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
181 in the previous paragraph.
183 You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These
184 and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several
187 * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
188 * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
189 * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
190 * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
192 If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or
193 Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is
194 because the native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the
195 Emacs build procedure tries very hard to support even such limited
196 shells, but as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on
197 Windows 9x, we cannot guarantee that it works without a more
200 Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
201 found at the Emacs Wiki:
203 http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
207 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
208 http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx
210 The second URL above includes instructions for building with MSVC,
211 as well as with MinGW, while the first URL covers only MinGW, but
212 has more details about it.
216 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
217 `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
218 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
219 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
220 options on the command line when invoking configure.
222 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
223 simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no
224 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
226 N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
227 is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
228 surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell.
230 You are encouraged to look at the file config.log which shows details
231 for failed tests, after configure.bat finishes. Any unexplained failure
232 should be investigated and perhaps reported as a bug (see the section
233 about reporting bugs in the file README in this directory and in the
236 * Optional image library support
238 In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can
239 handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png and jpeg (postscript is
240 currently unsupported on Windows). To build Emacs with support for
241 them, the corresponding headers must be in the include path when the
242 configure script is run. This can be setup using environment
243 variables, or by specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line
244 to configure.bat. The configure script will report whether it was
245 able to detect the headers. If the results of this testing appear to be
246 incorrect, please look for details in the file config.log: it will show
247 the failed test programs and compiler error messages that should explain
248 what is wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers
249 are missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.)
251 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
252 functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the
253 PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a
254 library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be
255 unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can
256 not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than
257 restarting. See the variable `image-library-alist' to configure the
258 expected names of the libraries.
260 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
261 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
262 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
263 is in the PATH or otherwise accesible and that the binaries are
264 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
266 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
267 the GnuWin32 project. These are built with MinGW, but they can be
268 used with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on
269 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html for more details about
270 installing image support libraries.
274 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
275 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
276 GNU make. (If you are building out of CVS, say "make bootstrap" or
277 "nmake bootstrap" instead.)
279 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
280 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
281 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
282 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
283 until then we will just live with them.
285 With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have Make
286 execute several commands at once, like this:
288 gmake -j 4 XMFLAGS="-j 3"
290 The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make on
291 Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum number
292 of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows up to 4
293 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and up to 3 in
294 each one of the recursive Make's; you can use other numbers of jobs,
297 If you are building from CVS, the following commands will produce
298 the Info manuals (which are not part of the CVS repository):
304 Note that you will need makeinfo.exe (from the GNU Texinfo package)
305 in order for this command to succeed.
309 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
310 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
313 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
314 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
315 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
318 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
320 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
322 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
323 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
327 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
328 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API
329 headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
330 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
331 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
332 cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
333 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
335 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
336 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
337 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
338 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
339 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c. The W32 API
340 headers that come with Cygwin b20.1 are incomplete, and do not include
341 some definitions required by addsection.c, for instance. Also, older
342 releases of the W32 API headers from Anders Norlander contain a typo
343 in the definition of IMAGE_FIRST_SECTION in winnt.h, which
344 addsection.c relies on. Versions of w32api-xxx.zip from at least
345 1999-11-18 onwards are okay.
347 When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file
348 config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler
349 messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue,
350 please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from
353 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
354 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
355 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
356 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
358 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
359 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
361 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
364 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
365 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
367 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
372 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
373 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
374 compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC.
376 When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows
377 pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug
378 Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES
379 twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up
380 automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and
381 attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command,
382 where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the
383 Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and
384 only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to
385 the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal
388 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
389 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
390 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
391 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
392 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
393 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
394 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
396 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
397 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger,
398 Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a
399 readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB,
400 there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides
401 definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore,
402 the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.
404 The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger
405 via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should
406 be displayed in the console window that was opened when the
407 emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger
408 should be displayed in its "Debug" output window.
410 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
411 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, popup the QuickWatch
412 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
413 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
414 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
415 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
416 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
417 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
418 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
419 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
420 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
421 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
423 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
424 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
425 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
426 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
427 procedure and try using debug_print again.
429 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
430 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
431 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
432 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
433 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
434 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
435 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
439 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
441 GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
442 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
443 the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
446 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
447 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
448 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
449 GNU General Public License for more details.
451 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
452 along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the
453 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
454 Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.