1 Building and Installing Emacs
2 on Windows NT/2K/XP and Windows 95/98/ME
4 Copyright (c) 2001,2004 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:
20 To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0 or
21 later and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later with Mingw
22 and W32 API support and a port of GNU make. You can use the Cygwin
23 ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the Mingw headers and libraries to
24 build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least since v1.3.3,
25 include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral part).
27 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
28 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
29 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless
30 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
31 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
32 in the previous paragraph.
34 If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or
35 Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash.
37 Please see http://www.mingw.org for pointers to GCC/Mingw binaries.
39 For reference, here is a list of which builds of GNU make are known
40 to work or not, and whether they work in the presence and/or absence
41 of sh.exe, the Cygwin port of Bash. Note that any version of make
42 that is compiled with Cygwin will only work with Cygwin tools, due to
43 the use of cygwin style paths. This means Cygwin make is unsuitable
44 for building parts of Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and
45 "make bootstrap", for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section
46 below if you decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
48 In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process,
49 at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use cmd.exe, the default NT shell,
54 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
55 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
56 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
57 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
58 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
59 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
60 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
61 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
62 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
66 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
67 emacs source with text!=binary.
68 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
69 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
71 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
72 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
73 May work if building emacs without leim.
77 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
78 nt subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
79 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
80 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
81 options on the command line when invoking configure.
83 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
84 simply change to the nt subdirectory and run `configure' with no
85 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
87 N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
88 is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
89 surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell.
91 * Optional image library support
93 In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can
94 handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png and jpeg (postscript is
95 currently unsupported on Windows). To build Emacs with support for
96 them, the corresponding headers must be in the include path when the
97 configure script is run. This can be setup using environment
98 variables, or by specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line
99 to configure.bat. The configure script will report whether it was
100 able to detect the headers.
102 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
103 functionality must be found when Emacs is started, either on the PATH,
104 or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a library is
105 not an error; the associated image format will simply be unavailable.
107 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
108 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
109 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
110 is in the PATH or otherwise accesible and that the binaries are
111 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
113 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
114 GnuWin32 (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net). These are built with
115 MinGW, and so are very compatible with GCC/MinGW builds of Emacs (like
116 the official binary tarballs for Windows). Compatibility with MSVC,
117 on the other hand, is still weak and should not be trusted in
118 production environments; if you really need an MSVC-compiled Emacs
119 with image support, you should try to build the required libraries
120 with the same compiler (though it can be extremely non-trivial, and
121 we'll be interested on hearing of any such effort).
125 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
126 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
129 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
130 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
131 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
132 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
133 until then we will just live with them.
137 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
138 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
141 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
142 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
143 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
146 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
148 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
150 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
151 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
155 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
156 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old Mingw or W32 API
157 headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
158 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
159 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
160 cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
161 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
163 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
164 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
165 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
166 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
167 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c. The W32 API
168 headers that come with Cygwin b20.1 are incomplete, and do not include
169 some definitions required by addsection.c, for instance. Also, older
170 releases of the W32 API headers from Anders Norlander contain a typo
171 in the definition of IMAGE_FIRST_SECTION in winnt.h, which
172 addsection.c relies on. Versions of w32api-xxx.zip from at least
173 1999-11-18 onwards are okay.
175 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
176 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
177 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
178 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
180 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
181 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
183 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
186 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
187 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
189 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
194 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
195 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
196 compiled with MSVC, or gdb if compiled with gcc.
198 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
199 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
200 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
201 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
202 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
203 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
204 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
206 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
207 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in the MSVC
208 debugger, Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that
209 prints out a readable representation of a Lisp_Object. (If you are
210 using gdb, there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which
211 provides definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. The
212 following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.) The output
213 from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger via the
214 OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should be
215 displayed in the console window that was opened when the emacs.exe
216 executable was started. The output sent to the debugger should be
217 displayed in its "Debug" output window.
219 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
220 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, popup the QuickWatch
221 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
222 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
223 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
224 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
225 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
226 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
227 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
228 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
229 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
230 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
232 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
233 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
234 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
235 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
236 procedure and try using debug_print again.
238 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
239 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
240 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
241 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
242 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
243 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
244 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
249 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
250 of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the
251 copyright notice and permission notice are preserved,
252 and that the distributor grants the recipient permission
253 for further redistribution as permitted by this notice.
255 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
256 of this document, or of portions of it,
257 under the above conditions, provided also that they
258 carry prominent notices stating who last changed them,
259 and that any new or changed statements about the activities
260 of the Free Software Foundation are approved by the Foundation.