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 Windows32 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 (but see notes about using
30 VC++ 8.0 and later below):
34 For the development environments based on GNU GCC (MinGW, MSYS,
35 Cygwin - but see notes about Cygwin make below), depending on how
36 Make is called, it could be:
46 (If you are building from CVS, say "make bootstrap" or "nmake
47 bootstrap" instead, and avoid using Cygwin make.)
49 With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have
50 Make execute several commands at once, like this:
52 gmake -j 2 XMFLAGS="-j 2"
54 The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make
55 on Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum
56 number of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows
57 up to 4 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and
58 up to 3 in each one of the recursive Make's.
60 4. Generate the Info manuals (only if you are building out of CVS, and
61 if you have makeinfo.exe installed):
65 (change "make" to "nmake" if you use MSVC).
67 5. Install the produced binaries:
73 If these short instructions somehow fail, read the rest of this
78 If you used WinZip to unpack the distribution, we suggest to
79 remove the files and unpack again with a different program!
80 WinZip is known to create some subtle and hard to debug problems,
81 such as converting files to DOS CR-LF format, not creating empty
82 directories, etc. We suggest to use djtarnt.exe from the GNU FTP
85 If you are building out of CVS, then some files in this directory
86 (.bat files, nmake.defs and makefile.w32-in) may need the line-ends
87 fixing first. The easiest way to do this and avoid future conflicts
88 is to run the following command in this (emacs/nt) directory:
92 Alternatively, use programs that convert end-of-line format, such as
93 dos2unix and unix2dos available from GnuWin32 or dtou and utod from
96 In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.CVS in the
97 parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of
98 "touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not
101 * Supported development environments
103 To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0, or
104 later up to 7.0, and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later
105 with MinGW and W32 API support and a port of GNU Make. You can use
106 the Cygwin ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and
107 libraries to build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least
108 since v1.3.3, include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral
111 Note that building Emacs with Visual Studio 2005 (VC++ 8.0) is not
112 supported at this time, due to changes introduced by Microsoft into
113 the libraries shipped with the compiler.
115 The rest of this file assumes you have a working development
116 environment. If you just installed such an environment, try
117 building a trivial C "Hello world" program, and see if it works. If
118 it doesn't work, resolve that problem first!
120 If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there
121 are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by
122 Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows
123 or sh.exe., a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, below is a list
124 of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether
125 they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port
126 of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin
127 will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of cygwin style
128 paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of
129 Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap",
130 for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you
131 decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
133 In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process,
134 at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the default Windows shell,
135 instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various problems. If you have
136 MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the use of cmd.exe
141 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
142 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
143 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
144 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
145 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
146 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
147 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
148 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
149 cygwin compiled make 3.80: fails?[6] fails?[6]
150 cygwin compiled make 3.81: fails fails?[6]
151 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
152 mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay okay[6]
153 mingw32 compiled make 3.81: okay okay[7]
157 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
158 emacs source with text!=binary.
159 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
160 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
162 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
163 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
164 May work if building emacs without leim.
165 [6] not recommended; please report if you try this combination.
166 [7] tested only on Windows XP.
168 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
169 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
170 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless
171 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
172 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
173 in the previous paragraph.
175 You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These
176 and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several
179 * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
180 * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
181 * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
182 * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
184 If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or
185 Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is
186 because the native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the
187 Emacs build procedure tries very hard to support even such limited
188 shells, but as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on
189 Windows 9x, we cannot guarantee that it works without a more
192 Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
193 found at the Emacs Wiki:
195 http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
199 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
200 http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx
202 The second URL above includes instructions for building with MSVC,
203 as well as with MinGW, while the first URL covers only MinGW, but
204 has more details about it.
208 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
209 `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
210 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
211 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
212 options on the command line when invoking configure.
214 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
215 simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no
216 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
218 N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
219 is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
220 surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell.
222 You are encouraged to look at the file config.log which shows details
223 for failed tests, after configure.bat finishes. Any unexplained failure
224 should be investigated and perhaps reported as a bug (see the section
225 about reporting bugs in the file README in this directory and in the
228 * Optional image library support
230 In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can
231 handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png and jpeg (postscript is
232 currently unsupported on Windows). To build Emacs with support for
233 them, the corresponding headers must be in the include path when the
234 configure script is run. This can be setup using environment
235 variables, or by specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line
236 to configure.bat. The configure script will report whether it was
237 able to detect the headers. If the results of this testing appear to be
238 incorrect, please look for details in the file config.log: it will show
239 the failed test programs and compiler error messages that should explain
240 what is wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers
241 are missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.)
243 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
244 functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the
245 PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a
246 library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be
247 unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can
248 not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than
249 restarting. See the variable `image-library-alist' to configure the
250 expected names of the libraries.
252 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
253 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
254 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
255 is in the PATH or otherwise accesible and that the binaries are
256 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
258 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
259 the GnuWin32 project. These are built with MinGW, but they can be
260 used with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on
261 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html for more details about
262 installing image support libraries.
266 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
267 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
268 GNU make. (If you are building out of CVS, say "make bootstrap" or
269 "nmake bootstrap" instead.)
271 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
272 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
273 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
274 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
275 until then we will just live with them.
277 With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have Make
278 execute several commands at once, like this:
280 gmake -j 4 XMFLAGS="-j 3"
282 The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make on
283 Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum number
284 of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows up to 4
285 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and up to 3 in
286 each one of the recursive Make's; you can use other numbers of jobs,
289 If you are building from CVS, the following commands will produce
290 the Info manuals (which are not part of the CVS repository):
296 Note that you will need makeinfo.exe (from the GNU Texinfo package)
297 in order for this command to succeed.
301 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
302 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
305 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
306 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
307 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
310 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
312 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
314 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
315 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
319 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
320 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API
321 headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
322 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
323 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
324 cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
325 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
327 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
328 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
329 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
330 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
331 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c. The W32 API
332 headers that come with Cygwin b20.1 are incomplete, and do not include
333 some definitions required by addsection.c, for instance. Also, older
334 releases of the W32 API headers from Anders Norlander contain a typo
335 in the definition of IMAGE_FIRST_SECTION in winnt.h, which
336 addsection.c relies on. Versions of w32api-xxx.zip from at least
337 1999-11-18 onwards are okay.
339 When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file
340 config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler
341 messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue,
342 please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from
345 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
346 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
347 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
348 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
350 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
351 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
353 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
356 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
357 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
359 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
364 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
365 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
366 compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC.
368 When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows
369 pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug
370 Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES
371 twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up
372 automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and
373 attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command,
374 where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the
375 Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and
376 only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to
377 the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal
380 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
381 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
382 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
383 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
384 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
385 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
386 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
388 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
389 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger,
390 Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a
391 readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB,
392 there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides
393 definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore,
394 the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.
396 The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger
397 via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should
398 be displayed in the console window that was opened when the
399 emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger
400 should be displayed in its "Debug" output window.
402 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
403 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, popup the QuickWatch
404 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
405 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
406 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
407 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
408 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
409 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
410 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
411 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
412 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
413 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
415 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
416 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
417 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
418 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
419 procedure and try using debug_print again.
421 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
422 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
423 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
424 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
425 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
426 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
427 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
431 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
433 GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
434 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
435 the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
438 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
439 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
440 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
441 GNU General Public License for more details.
443 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
444 along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the
445 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
446 Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.