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, 2009
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 or TCC as your shell is known to fail the build
157 process, at least since 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the default
158 Windows shell, instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various
159 problems. If you have MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to
160 force the use of cmd.exe instead of sh.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, jpeg and experimental
261 To build Emacs with support for them, the corresponding headers must
262 be in the include path when the configure script is run. This can
263 be setup using environment variables, or by specifying --cflags
264 -I... options on the command-line to configure.bat. The configure
265 script will report whether it was able to detect the headers. If
266 the results of this testing appear to be incorrect, please look for
267 details in the file config.log: it will show the failed test
268 programs and compiler error messages that should explain what is
269 wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers are
270 missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.)
272 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
273 functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the
274 PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a
275 library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be
276 unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can
277 not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than
278 restarting. See the variable `image-library-alist' to configure the
279 expected names of the libraries.
281 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
282 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
283 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
284 is in the PATH or otherwise accessible and that the binaries are
285 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
287 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
288 the GnuWin32 project. PNG, JPEG and TIFF libraries are also
289 included with GTK, which is installed along with other Free Software
290 that requires it. These are built with MinGW, but they can be used
291 with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on
292 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html, under "How to Get
293 Images Support", for more details about installing image support
294 libraries. Note specifically that, due to some packaging snafus in
295 the GnuWin32-supplied image libraries, you will need to download
296 _source_ packages for some of the libraries in order to get the
297 header files necessary for building Emacs with image support.
299 If GTK 2.0 is installed, addpm will arrange for its image libraries
300 to be on the DLL search path for Emacs.
302 * Experimental SVG support
304 SVG support is currently experimental, and not built by default.
305 Specify --with-svg and ensure you have all the dependencies in your
306 include path. Unless you have built a minimalist librsvg yourself
307 (untested), librsvg depends on a significant chunk of GTK+ to build,
308 plus a few Gnome libraries, libxml2, libbz2 and zlib at runtime. The
309 easiest way to obtain the dependencies required for building is to
310 download a pre-bundled GTK+ development environment for Windows.
311 GTK puts its header files all over the place, so you will need to
312 run pkgconfig to list the include path you will need (either passed
313 to configure.bat as --cflags options, or set in the environment).
315 To use librsvg at runtime, ensure that librsvg and its dependencies
316 are on your PATH. If you didn't build librsvg yourself, you will
317 need to check with where you downloaded it from for the
318 dependencies, as there are different build options. If it is a
319 short list, then it most likely only lists the immediate
320 dependencies of librsvg, but the dependencies themselves have
321 dependencies - so don't download individual libraries from GTK+,
322 download and install the whole thing. If you think you've got all
323 the dependencies and SVG support is still not working, check your
324 PATH for other libraries that shadow the ones you downloaded.
325 Libraries of the same name from different sources may not be
326 compatible, this problem was encountered with libbzip2 from GnuWin32
327 with libcroco from gnome.org.
329 If you can see etc/images/splash.svg, then you have managed to get
330 SVG support working. Congratulations for making it through DLL hell
331 to this point. You'll probably find that some SVG images crash
332 Emacs. Problems have been observed in some images that contain
333 text, they seem to be a problem in the Windows port of Pango, or
334 maybe a problem with the way Cairo or librsvg is using it that
335 doesn't show up on other platforms.
339 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
340 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
341 GNU make. (If you are building out of CVS, say "make bootstrap" or
342 "nmake bootstrap" instead.)
344 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
345 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
346 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
347 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
348 until then we will just live with them.
350 With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have Make
351 execute several commands at once, like this:
353 gmake -j 4 XMFLAGS="-j 3"
355 The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make on
356 Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum number
357 of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows up to 4
358 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and up to 3 in
359 each one of the recursive Make's; you can use other numbers of jobs,
362 If you are building from CVS, the following commands will produce
363 the Info manuals (which are not part of the CVS repository):
369 Note that you will need makeinfo.exe (from the GNU Texinfo package)
370 in order for this command to succeed.
374 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
375 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
378 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
379 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
380 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
383 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
385 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
387 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
388 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
392 The following make targets may be used by users building the source
393 distribution, or users who have checked out of CVS after
394 an initial bootstrapping.
397 Builds Emacs from the available sources and pre-compiled lisp files.
400 Installs programs to the bin directory, and runs addpm to create
404 Removes object and executable files produced by the build process in
405 the current configuration. After make clean, you can rebuild with
406 the same configuration using make.
409 In addition to the files removed by make clean, this also removes
410 Makefiles and other generated files to get back to the state of a
411 freshly unpacked source distribution. Note that this will not remove
412 installed files, or the results of builds performed with different
413 compiler or optimization options than the current configuration.
414 After make distclean, it is necessary to run configure.bat followed
418 Removes object and executable files that may have been created by
419 previous builds with different configure options, in addition to
420 the files produced by the current configuration.
423 Removes the installed files in the bin subdirectory in addition to
424 the files removed by make cleanall.
427 The following targets are intended only for users who have checked out
431 Creates a temporary emacs binary with lisp source files and
432 uses it to compile the lisp files. Once the lisp files are built,
433 emacs is redumped with the compiled lisp.
436 Recompiles any changed lisp files after a cvs update. This saves
437 doing a full bootstrap after every update. If this or a subsequent
438 make fail, you probably need to perform a full bootstrap, though
439 running this target multiple times may eventually sort out the
442 make maintainer-clean
443 Removes everything that can be recreated, including compiled lisp
444 files, to get back to the state of a fresh CVS checkout. After make
445 maintainer-clean, it is necessary to run configure.bat and make
446 bootstrap to rebuild. Occasionally it may be necessary to run this
447 target after a cvs update.
452 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
453 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API
454 headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
455 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
456 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
457 cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
458 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
460 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
461 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
462 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
463 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
464 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c.
465 Older versions of the W32 API headers that come with Cygwin and MinGW
466 may be missing some definitions required by Emacs, or broken in other
467 ways. In particular, uniscribe APIs were added to MinGW CVS only on
468 2006-03-26, so releases from before then cannot be used.
470 When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file
471 config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler
472 messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue,
473 please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from
476 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
477 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
478 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
479 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
481 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
482 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
484 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
487 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
488 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
490 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
495 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
496 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
497 compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC. (GDB for Windows
498 is available from the MinGW site, http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml.)
500 When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows
501 pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug
502 Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES
503 twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up
504 automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and
505 attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command,
506 where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the
507 Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and
508 only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to
509 the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal
512 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
513 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
514 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
515 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
516 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
517 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
518 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
520 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
521 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger,
522 Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a
523 readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB,
524 there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides
525 definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore,
526 the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.
528 The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger
529 via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should
530 be displayed in the console window that was opened when the
531 emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger
532 should be displayed in its "Debug" output window.
534 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
535 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, pop up the QuickWatch
536 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
537 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
538 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
539 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
540 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
541 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
542 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
543 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
544 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
545 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
547 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
548 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
549 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
550 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
551 procedure and try using debug_print again.
553 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
554 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
555 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
556 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
557 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
558 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
559 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
563 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
565 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
566 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
567 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
568 (at your option) any later version.
570 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
571 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
572 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
573 GNU General Public License for more details.
575 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
576 along with GNU Emacs. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.