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 need Unix line
105 ends due to some embedded ^M characters that are not at the end of
106 the line. So in the lisp/international directory you should run the
107 following command, or use dos2unix on those files.
109 cvs update -kb uni-*.el
111 In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.CVS in the
112 parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of
113 "touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not
116 * Supported development environments
118 To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0, or
119 later up to 7.0, and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later
120 with MinGW and W32 API support and a port of GNU Make. You can use
121 the Cygwin ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and
122 libraries to build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least
123 since v1.3.3, include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral
126 Note that building Emacs with Visual Studio 2005 (VC++ 8.0) is not
127 supported at this time, due to changes introduced by Microsoft into
128 the libraries shipped with the compiler.
130 The rest of this file assumes you have a working development
131 environment. If you just installed such an environment, try
132 building a trivial C "Hello world" program, and see if it works. If
133 it doesn't work, resolve that problem first! If you use Microsoft
134 Visual Studio .NET 2003, don't forget to run the VCVARS32.BAT batch
135 file from the `Bin' subdirectory of the directory where you have
138 If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there
139 are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by
140 Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows
141 or sh.exe., a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, below is a list
142 of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether
143 they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port
144 of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin
145 will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of cygwin style
146 paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of
147 Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap",
148 for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you
149 decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
151 In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process,
152 at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the default Windows shell,
153 instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various problems. If you have
154 MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the use of cmd.exe
159 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
160 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
161 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
162 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
163 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
164 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
165 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
166 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
167 cygwin compiled make 3.80: okay[6] fails?[7]
168 cygwin compiled make 3.81: fails fails?[7]
169 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
170 mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay okay[7]
171 mingw32 compiled make 3.81: okay okay[8]
175 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
176 emacs source with text!=binary.
177 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
178 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
180 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
181 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
182 May work if building emacs without leim.
183 [6] need to uncomment 3 lines in nt/gmake.defs that invoke `cygpath'
184 (look for "cygpath" near line 85 of gmake.defs).
185 [7] not recommended; please report if you try this combination.
186 [8] tested only on Windows XP.
188 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
189 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
190 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless
191 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
192 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
193 in the previous paragraph.
195 You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These
196 and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several
199 * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
200 * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
201 * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
202 * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
204 If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or
205 Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is
206 because the native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the
207 Emacs build procedure tries very hard to support even such limited
208 shells, but as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on
209 Windows 9x, we cannot guarantee that it works without a more
212 Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
213 found at the Emacs Wiki:
215 http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
219 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
220 http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx
222 The second URL above includes instructions for building with MSVC,
223 as well as with MinGW, while the first URL covers only MinGW, but
224 has more details about it.
228 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
229 `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
230 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
231 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
232 options on the command line when invoking configure.
234 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
235 simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no
236 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
237 Do NOT use the --no-debug option to configure.bat unless you are
238 absolutely sure the produced binaries will never need to be run under
241 N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
242 is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
243 surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell.
245 You are encouraged to look at the file config.log which shows details
246 for failed tests, after configure.bat finishes. Any unexplained failure
247 should be investigated and perhaps reported as a bug (see the section
248 about reporting bugs in the file README in this directory and in the
251 * Optional image library support
253 In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can
254 handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png and jpeg (postscript is
255 currently unsupported on Windows). To build Emacs with support for
256 them, the corresponding headers must be in the include path when the
257 configure script is run. This can be setup using environment
258 variables, or by specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line
259 to configure.bat. The configure script will report whether it was
260 able to detect the headers. If the results of this testing appear to be
261 incorrect, please look for details in the file config.log: it will show
262 the failed test programs and compiler error messages that should explain
263 what is wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers
264 are missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.)
266 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
267 functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the
268 PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a
269 library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be
270 unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can
271 not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than
272 restarting. See the variable `image-library-alist' to configure the
273 expected names of the libraries.
275 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
276 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
277 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
278 is in the PATH or otherwise accesible and that the binaries are
279 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
281 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
282 the GnuWin32 project. These are built with MinGW, but they can be
283 used with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on
284 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html, under "How to Get
285 Images Support", for more details about installing image support
286 libraries. Note specifically that, due to some packaging snafus in
287 the GnuWin32-supplied image libraries, you will need to download
288 _source_ packages for some of the libraries in order to get the
289 header files necessary for building Emacs with image support.
293 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
294 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
295 GNU make. (If you are building out of CVS, say "make bootstrap" or
296 "nmake bootstrap" instead.)
298 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
299 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
300 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
301 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
302 until then we will just live with them.
304 With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have Make
305 execute several commands at once, like this:
307 gmake -j 4 XMFLAGS="-j 3"
309 The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make on
310 Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum number
311 of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows up to 4
312 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and up to 3 in
313 each one of the recursive Make's; you can use other numbers of jobs,
316 If you are building from CVS, the following commands will produce
317 the Info manuals (which are not part of the CVS repository):
323 Note that you will need makeinfo.exe (from the GNU Texinfo package)
324 in order for this command to succeed.
328 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
329 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
332 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
333 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
334 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
337 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
339 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
341 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
342 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
346 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
347 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API
348 headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
349 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
350 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
351 cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
352 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
354 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
355 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
356 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
357 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
358 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c. The W32 API
359 headers that come with Cygwin b20.1 are incomplete, and do not include
360 some definitions required by addsection.c, for instance. Also, older
361 releases of the W32 API headers from Anders Norlander contain a typo
362 in the definition of IMAGE_FIRST_SECTION in winnt.h, which
363 addsection.c relies on. Versions of w32api-xxx.zip from at least
364 1999-11-18 onwards are okay.
366 When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file
367 config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler
368 messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue,
369 please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from
372 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
373 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
374 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
375 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
377 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
378 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
380 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
383 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
384 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
386 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
391 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
392 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
393 compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC. (GDB for Windows
394 is available from the MinGW site, http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml.)
396 When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows
397 pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug
398 Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES
399 twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up
400 automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and
401 attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command,
402 where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the
403 Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and
404 only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to
405 the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal
408 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
409 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
410 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
411 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
412 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
413 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
414 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
416 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
417 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger,
418 Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a
419 readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB,
420 there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides
421 definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore,
422 the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.
424 The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger
425 via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should
426 be displayed in the console window that was opened when the
427 emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger
428 should be displayed in its "Debug" output window.
430 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
431 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, popup the QuickWatch
432 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
433 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
434 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
435 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
436 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
437 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
438 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
439 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
440 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
441 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
443 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
444 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
445 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
446 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
447 procedure and try using debug_print again.
449 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
450 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
451 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
452 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
453 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
454 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
455 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
459 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
461 GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
462 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
463 the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option)
466 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
467 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
468 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
469 GNU General Public License for more details.
471 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
472 along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the
473 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
474 Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.