1 Copyright (C) 2001-2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
2 See the end of the file for license conditions.
5 This directory tree holds version 26.1.90 of GNU Emacs, the extensible,
6 customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor.
8 The file INSTALL in this directory says how to build and install GNU
9 Emacs on various systems, once you have unpacked or checked out the
10 entire Emacs file tree.
12 See the file etc/NEWS for information on new features and other
13 user-visible changes in recent versions of Emacs.
15 The file etc/PROBLEMS contains information on many common problems that
16 occur in building, installing and running Emacs.
18 The file CONTRIBUTE contains information on contributing to Emacs as a
21 You may encounter bugs in this release. If you do, please report
22 them; your bug reports are valuable contributions to the FSF, since
23 they allow us to notice and fix problems on machines we don't have, or
24 in code we don't use often. Please send bug reports to the mailing
25 list bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. If possible, use M-x report-emacs-bug.
27 See the "Bugs" section of the Emacs manual for more information on how
28 to report bugs. (The file 'BUGS' in this directory explains how you
29 can find and read that section using the Info files that come with
30 Emacs.) For a list of mailing lists related to Emacs, see
31 <https://savannah.gnu.org/mail/?group=emacs>. For the complete
32 list of GNU mailing lists, see <https://lists.gnu.org/>.
34 The 'etc' subdirectory contains several other files, named in capital
35 letters, which you might consider looking at when installing GNU
38 The file 'configure' is a shell script to acclimate Emacs to the
39 oddities of your processor and operating system. It creates the file
40 'Makefile' (a script for the 'make' program), which automates the
41 process of building and installing Emacs. See INSTALL for more
44 The file 'configure.ac' is the input used by the autoconf program to
45 construct the 'configure' script.
47 The shell script 'autogen.sh' generates 'configure' and other files by
48 running Autoconf (which in turn uses GNU m4), and configures files in
49 the .git subdirectory if you are using Git. If you want to use it,
50 you will need to install recent versions of these build tools. This
51 should be needed only if you edit files like 'configure.ac' that
52 specify Emacs's autobuild procedure.
54 The file 'Makefile.in' is a template used by 'configure' to create
57 The file 'make-dist' is a shell script to build a distribution tar
58 file from the current Emacs tree, containing only those files
59 appropriate for distribution. If you make extensive changes to Emacs,
60 this script will help you distribute your version to others.
62 There are several subdirectories:
64 'src' holds the C code for Emacs (the Emacs Lisp interpreter and
65 its primitives, the redisplay code, and some basic editing
67 'lisp' holds the Emacs Lisp code for Emacs (most everything else).
68 'leim' holds the original source files for the generated files
69 in lisp/leim. These form the library of Emacs input methods,
70 required to type international characters that can't be
71 directly produced by your keyboard.
72 'lib' holds source code for libraries used by Emacs and its utilities
73 'lib-src' holds the source code for some utility programs for use by or
74 with Emacs, like movemail and etags.
75 'lwlib' holds the sources of the Lucid Widget Library used on X.
76 'oldXMenu' source files from X11R2 XMenu library, used in non-toolkit builds.
77 'etc' holds miscellaneous architecture-independent data files Emacs
78 uses, like the tutorial text and tool bar images.
79 The contents of the 'lisp', 'leim', 'info', and 'doc'
80 subdirectories are architecture-independent too.
81 'info' holds the Info documentation tree for Emacs.
82 'doc/emacs' holds the source code for the Emacs Manual. If you modify the
83 manual sources, you will need the 'makeinfo' program to produce
84 an updated manual. 'makeinfo' is part of the GNU Texinfo
85 package; you need a suitably recent version of Texinfo.
86 'doc/lispref' holds the source code for the Emacs Lisp reference manual.
87 'doc/lispintro' holds the source code for the Introduction to Programming
89 'msdos' holds configuration files for compiling Emacs under MS-DOS.
90 'nextstep' holds instructions and some other files for compiling the
91 Nextstep port of Emacs, for GNUstep and macOS Cocoa.
92 'nt' holds code and documentation for building Emacs on MS-Windows.
93 'test' holds tests for various aspects of Emacs's functionality.
94 'modules' holds the modhelp.py helper script.
95 'admin' holds files used by Emacs developers, and Unicode data files.
96 'build-aux' holds auxiliary files used during the build.
97 'm4' holds Autoconf macros used for generating the configure script.
99 Building Emacs on non-Posix platforms requires tools that aren't part
100 of the standard distribution of the OS. The platform-specific README
101 files and installation instructions should list the required tools.
104 NOTE ON COPYRIGHT YEARS
106 In copyright notices where the copyright holder is the Free Software
107 Foundation, then where a range of years appears, this is an inclusive
108 range that applies to every year in the range. For example: 2005-2008
109 represents the years 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008.
112 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
114 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
115 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
116 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
117 (at your option) any later version.
119 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
120 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
121 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
122 GNU General Public License for more details.
124 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
125 along with GNU Emacs. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.