1 Building and Installing Emacs
2 on Windows NT/2K/XP and Windows 95/98/ME
4 Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5 See the end of the file for copying permissions.
7 If you used WinZip to unpack the distribution, we suggest to
8 remove the files and unpack again with a different program!
9 WinZip is known to create some subtle and hard to debug problems,
10 such as converting files to DOS CR-LF format, not creating empty
11 directories, etc. We suggest to use djtarnt.exe from the GNU FTP
14 If you are building out of CVS, then some files in this directory
15 (.bat files, nmake.defs and makefile.w32-in) may need the line-ends
16 fixing first. The easiest way to do this and avoid future conflicts
17 is to run the following command in this (emacs/nt) directory:
21 Alternatively, use programs that convert end-of-line format, such as
22 dos2unix and unix2dos available from GnuWin32 or dtou and utod from
25 In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.CVS in the
26 parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of
27 "touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not
30 To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0 or
31 later and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later with MinGW
32 and W32 API support and a port of GNU make. You can use the Cygwin
33 ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and libraries to
34 build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least since v1.3.3,
35 include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral part).
37 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
38 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
39 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless
40 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
41 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
42 in the previous paragraph.
44 You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These
45 and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several
48 * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
49 * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
50 * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
51 * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
53 If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or
54 Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash.
56 Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
57 found at the Emacs Wiki:
59 http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
63 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
65 For reference, here is a list of which builds of GNU make are known
66 to work or not, and whether they work in the presence and/or absence
67 of sh.exe, the Cygwin port of Bash. Note that any version of make
68 that is compiled with Cygwin will only work with Cygwin tools, due to
69 the use of cygwin style paths. This means Cygwin make is unsuitable
70 for building parts of Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and
71 "make bootstrap", for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section
72 below if you decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
74 In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process,
75 at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use cmd.exe, the default NT shell,
76 instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various problems. If you have
77 MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the use of cmd.exe
82 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
83 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
84 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
85 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
86 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
87 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
88 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
89 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
90 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
91 mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay unknown[6]
95 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
96 emacs source with text!=binary.
97 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
98 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
100 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
101 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
102 May work if building emacs without leim.
103 [6] please report if you try this combination.
107 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
108 nt subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
109 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
110 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
111 options on the command line when invoking configure.
113 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
114 simply change to the nt subdirectory and run `configure' with no
115 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
117 N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
118 is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
119 surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell.
121 You are encouraged to look at the file config.log which shows details
122 for failed tests, after configure.bat finishes. Any unexplained failure
123 should be investigated and perhaps reported as a bug (see the section
124 about reporting bugs in the file README in this directory and in the
127 * Optional image library support
129 In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can
130 handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png and jpeg (postscript is
131 currently unsupported on Windows). To build Emacs with support for
132 them, the corresponding headers must be in the include path when the
133 configure script is run. This can be setup using environment
134 variables, or by specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line
135 to configure.bat. The configure script will report whether it was
136 able to detect the headers. If the results of this testing appear to be
137 incorrect, please look for details in the file config.log: it will show
138 the failed test programs and compiler error messages that should explain
139 what is wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers
140 are missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.)
142 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
143 functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the
144 PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a
145 library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be
146 unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can
147 not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than
148 restarting. See the variable `image-library-alist' to configure the
149 expected names of the libraries.
151 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
152 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
153 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
154 is in the PATH or otherwise accesible and that the binaries are
155 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
157 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
158 the GnuWin32 project. These are built with MinGW, but they can be
159 used with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on
160 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html for more details about
161 installing image support libraries.
165 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
166 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
169 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
170 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
171 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
172 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
173 until then we will just live with them.
177 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
178 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
181 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
182 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
183 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
186 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
188 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
190 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
191 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
195 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
196 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API
197 headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
198 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
199 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
200 cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
201 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
203 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
204 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
205 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
206 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
207 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c. The W32 API
208 headers that come with Cygwin b20.1 are incomplete, and do not include
209 some definitions required by addsection.c, for instance. Also, older
210 releases of the W32 API headers from Anders Norlander contain a typo
211 in the definition of IMAGE_FIRST_SECTION in winnt.h, which
212 addsection.c relies on. Versions of w32api-xxx.zip from at least
213 1999-11-18 onwards are okay.
215 When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file
216 config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler
217 messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue,
218 please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from
221 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
222 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
223 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
224 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
226 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
227 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
229 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
232 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
233 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
235 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
240 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
241 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
242 compiled with MSVC, or gdb if compiled with gcc.
244 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
245 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
246 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
247 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
248 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
249 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
250 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
252 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
253 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in the MSVC
254 debugger, Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that
255 prints out a readable representation of a Lisp_Object. (If you are
256 using gdb, there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which
257 provides definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. The
258 following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.) The output
259 from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger via the
260 OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should be
261 displayed in the console window that was opened when the emacs.exe
262 executable was started. The output sent to the debugger should be
263 displayed in its "Debug" output window.
265 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
266 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, popup the QuickWatch
267 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
268 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
269 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
270 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
271 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
272 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
273 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
274 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
275 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
276 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
278 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
279 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
280 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
281 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
282 procedure and try using debug_print again.
284 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
285 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
286 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
287 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
288 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
289 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
290 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
295 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
296 of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the
297 copyright notice and permission notice are preserved,
298 and that the distributor grants the recipient permission
299 for further redistribution as permitted by this notice.
301 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
302 of this document, or of portions of it,
303 under the above conditions, provided also that they
304 carry prominent notices stating who last changed them,
305 and that any new or changed statements about the activities
306 of the Free Software Foundation are approved by the Foundation.