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, 2008
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 Additionally, the files lisp/international/uni-*.el and
105 lisp/ldefs-boot.el need Unix line ends due to some embedded ^M
106 characters that are not at the end of the line. So in the
107 lisp/international directory you should run the following command, or
108 use dos2unix on those files.
110 cvs update -kb uni-*.el
112 and in the lisp directory, use the command:
114 cvs update -kb lisp/ldefs-boot.el
116 In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.CVS in the
117 parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of
118 "touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not
121 * Supported development environments
123 To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0, or
124 later up to 7.0, and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later
125 with MinGW and W32 API support and a port of GNU Make. You can use
126 the Cygwin ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and
127 libraries to build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least
128 since v1.3.3, include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral
131 Note that building Emacs with Visual Studio 2005 (VC++ 8.0) is not
132 supported at this time, due to changes introduced by Microsoft into
133 the libraries shipped with the compiler.
135 The rest of this file assumes you have a working development
136 environment. If you just installed such an environment, try
137 building a trivial C "Hello world" program, and see if it works. If
138 it doesn't work, resolve that problem first! If you use Microsoft
139 Visual Studio .NET 2003, don't forget to run the VCVARS32.BAT batch
140 file from the `Bin' subdirectory of the directory where you have
143 If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there
144 are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by
145 Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows
146 or sh.exe., a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, below is a list
147 of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether
148 they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port
149 of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin
150 will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of cygwin style
151 paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of
152 Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap",
153 for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you
154 decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
156 In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process,
157 at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the default Windows shell,
158 instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various problems. If you have
159 MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the use of cmd.exe
164 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
165 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
166 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
167 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
168 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
169 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
170 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
171 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
172 cygwin compiled make 3.80: okay[6] fails?[7]
173 cygwin compiled make 3.81: fails fails?[7]
174 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
175 mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay okay[7]
176 mingw32 compiled make 3.81: okay okay[8]
180 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
181 emacs source with text!=binary.
182 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
183 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
185 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
186 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
187 May work if building emacs without leim.
188 [6] need to uncomment 3 lines in nt/gmake.defs that invoke `cygpath'
189 (look for "cygpath" near line 85 of gmake.defs).
190 [7] not recommended; please report if you try this combination.
191 [8] tested only on Windows XP.
193 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
194 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
195 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behavior. Unless
196 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
197 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
198 in the previous paragraph.
200 You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These
201 and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several
204 * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
205 * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
206 * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
207 * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
209 If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or
210 Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is
211 because the native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the
212 Emacs build procedure tries very hard to support even such limited
213 shells, but as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on
214 Windows 9x, we cannot guarantee that it works without a more
217 Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
218 found at the Emacs Wiki:
220 http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
224 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
225 http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx
227 The second URL above includes instructions for building with MSVC,
228 as well as with MinGW, while the first URL covers only MinGW, but
229 has more details about it.
233 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
234 `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
235 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
236 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
237 options on the command line when invoking configure.
239 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
240 simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no
241 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
242 Do NOT use the --no-debug option to configure.bat unless you are
243 absolutely sure the produced binaries will never need to be run under
246 N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
247 is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
248 suppressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell.
250 You are encouraged to look at the file config.log which shows details
251 for failed tests, after configure.bat finishes. Any unexplained failure
252 should be investigated and perhaps reported as a bug (see the section
253 about reporting bugs in the file README in this directory and in the
256 * Optional image library support
258 In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can
259 handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png and jpeg (postscript is
260 currently unsupported on Windows). To build Emacs with support for
261 them, the corresponding headers must be in the include path when the
262 configure script is run. This can be setup using environment
263 variables, or by specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line
264 to configure.bat. The configure script will report whether it was
265 able to detect the headers. If the results of this testing appear to be
266 incorrect, please look for details in the file config.log: it will show
267 the failed test programs and compiler error messages that should explain
268 what is wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers
269 are missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.)
271 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
272 functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the
273 PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a
274 library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be
275 unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can
276 not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than
277 restarting. See the variable `image-library-alist' to configure the
278 expected names of the libraries.
280 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
281 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
282 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
283 is in the PATH or otherwise accessible and that the binaries are
284 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
286 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
287 the GnuWin32 project. PNG, JPEG and TIFF libraries are also
288 included with GTK, which is installed along with other Free Software
289 that requires it. These are built with MinGW, but they can be used
290 with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on
291 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html, under "How to Get
292 Images Support", for more details about installing image support
293 libraries. Note specifically that, due to some packaging snafus in
294 the GnuWin32-supplied image libraries, you will need to download
295 _source_ packages for some of the libraries in order to get the
296 header files necessary for building Emacs with image support.
298 If GTK 2.0 is installed, addpm will arrange for its image libraries
299 to be on the DLL search path for Emacs.
303 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
304 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
305 GNU make. (If you are building out of CVS, say "make bootstrap" or
306 "nmake bootstrap" instead.)
308 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
309 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
310 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
311 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
312 until then we will just live with them.
314 With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have Make
315 execute several commands at once, like this:
317 gmake -j 4 XMFLAGS="-j 3"
319 The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make on
320 Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum number
321 of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows up to 4
322 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and up to 3 in
323 each one of the recursive Make's; you can use other numbers of jobs,
326 If you are building from CVS, the following commands will produce
327 the Info manuals (which are not part of the CVS repository):
333 Note that you will need makeinfo.exe (from the GNU Texinfo package)
334 in order for this command to succeed.
338 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
339 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
342 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
343 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
344 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
347 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
349 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
351 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
352 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
356 The following make targets may be used by users building the source
357 distribution, or users who have checked out of CVS after
358 an initial bootstrapping.
361 Builds Emacs from the available sources and pre-compiled lisp files.
364 Installs programs to the bin directory, and runs addpm to create
368 Removes object and executable files produced by the build process in
369 the current configuration. After make clean, you can rebuild with
370 the same configuration using make.
373 In addition to the files removed by make clean, this also removes
374 Makefiles and other generated files to get back to the state of a
375 freshly unpacked source distribution. Note that this will not remove
376 installed files, or the results of builds performed with different
377 compiler or optimization options than the current configuration.
378 After make distclean, it is necessary to run configure.bat followed
382 Removes object and executable files that may have been created by
383 previous builds with different configure options, in addition to
384 the files produced by the current configuration.
387 Removes the installed files in the bin subdirectory in addition to
388 the files removed by make cleanall.
391 The following targets are intended only for users who have checked out
395 Creates a temporary emacs binary with lisp source files and
396 uses it to compile the lisp files. Once the lisp files are built,
397 emacs is redumped with the compiled lisp.
400 Recompiles any changed lisp files after a cvs update. This saves
401 doing a full bootstrap after every update. If this or a subsequent
402 make fail, you probably need to perform a full bootstrap, though
403 running this target multiple times may eventually sort out the
406 make maintainer-clean
407 Removes everything that can be recreated, including compiled lisp
408 files, to get back to the state of a fresh CVS checkout. After make
409 maintainer-clean, it is necessary to run configure.bat and make
410 bootstrap to rebuild. Occasionally it may be necessary to run this
411 target after a cvs update.
416 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
417 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API
418 headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
419 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
420 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
421 cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
422 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
424 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
425 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
426 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
427 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
428 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c.
429 Older versions of the W32 API headers that come with Cygwin and MinGW
430 may be missing some definitions required by Emacs, or broken in other
431 ways. In particular, uniscribe APIs were added to MinGW CVS only on
432 2006-03-26, so releases from before then cannot be used.
434 When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file
435 config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler
436 messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue,
437 please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from
440 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
441 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
442 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
443 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
445 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
446 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
448 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
451 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
452 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
454 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
459 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
460 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
461 compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC. (GDB for Windows
462 is available from the MinGW site, http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml.)
464 When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows
465 pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug
466 Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES
467 twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up
468 automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and
469 attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command,
470 where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the
471 Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and
472 only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to
473 the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal
476 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
477 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
478 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
479 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
480 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
481 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
482 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
484 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
485 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger,
486 Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a
487 readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB,
488 there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides
489 definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore,
490 the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.
492 The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger
493 via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should
494 be displayed in the console window that was opened when the
495 emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger
496 should be displayed in its "Debug" output window.
498 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
499 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, pop up the QuickWatch
500 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
501 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
502 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
503 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
504 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
505 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
506 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
507 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
508 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
509 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
511 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
512 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
513 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
514 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
515 procedure and try using debug_print again.
517 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
518 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
519 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
520 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
521 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
522 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
523 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
527 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
529 GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
530 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
531 the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option)
534 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
535 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
536 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
537 GNU General Public License for more details.
539 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
540 along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the
541 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
542 Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.