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 file lisp/ldefs-boot.el needs Unix line ends due
105 to some embedded ^M characters that are not at the end of the line.
106 So in the lisp directory you should run "cvs update -kb ldefs-boot.el",
107 or use dos2unix on that file.
109 In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.CVS in the
110 parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of
111 "touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not
114 * Supported development environments
116 To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0, or
117 later up to 7.0, and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later
118 with MinGW and W32 API support and a port of GNU Make. You can use
119 the Cygwin ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and
120 libraries to build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least
121 since v1.3.3, include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral
124 Note that building Emacs with Visual Studio 2005 (VC++ 8.0) is not
125 supported at this time, due to changes introduced by Microsoft into
126 the libraries shipped with the compiler.
128 The rest of this file assumes you have a working development
129 environment. If you just installed such an environment, try
130 building a trivial C "Hello world" program, and see if it works. If
131 it doesn't work, resolve that problem first! If you use Microsoft
132 Visual Studio .NET 2003, don't forget to run the VCVARS32.BAT batch
133 file from the `Bin' subdirectory of the directory where you have
136 If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there
137 are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by
138 Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows
139 or sh.exe., a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, below is a list
140 of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether
141 they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port
142 of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin
143 will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of cygwin style
144 paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of
145 Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap",
146 for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you
147 decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
149 In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process,
150 at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the default Windows shell,
151 instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various problems. If you have
152 MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the use of cmd.exe
157 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
158 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
159 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
160 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
161 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
162 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
163 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
164 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
165 cygwin compiled make 3.80: okay[6] fails?[7]
166 cygwin compiled make 3.81: fails fails?[7]
167 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
168 mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay okay[7]
169 mingw32 compiled make 3.81: okay okay[8]
173 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
174 emacs source with text!=binary.
175 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
176 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
178 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
179 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
180 May work if building emacs without leim.
181 [6] need to uncomment 3 lines in nt/gmake.defs that invoke `cygpath'
182 (look for "cygpath" near line 85 of gmake.defs).
183 [7] not recommended; please report if you try this combination.
184 [8] tested only on Windows XP.
186 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
187 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
188 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless
189 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
190 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
191 in the previous paragraph.
193 You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These
194 and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several
197 * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
198 * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
199 * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
200 * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
202 If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or
203 Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is
204 because the native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the
205 Emacs build procedure tries very hard to support even such limited
206 shells, but as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on
207 Windows 9x, we cannot guarantee that it works without a more
210 Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
211 found at the Emacs Wiki:
213 http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
217 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
218 http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx
220 The second URL above includes instructions for building with MSVC,
221 as well as with MinGW, while the first URL covers only MinGW, but
222 has more details about it.
226 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
227 `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
228 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
229 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
230 options on the command line when invoking configure.
232 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
233 simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no
234 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
235 Do NOT use the --no-debug option to configure.bat unless you are
236 absolutely sure the produced binaries will never need to be run under
239 N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
240 is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
241 surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell.
243 You are encouraged to look at the file config.log which shows details
244 for failed tests, after configure.bat finishes. Any unexplained failure
245 should be investigated and perhaps reported as a bug (see the section
246 about reporting bugs in the file README in this directory and in the
249 * Optional image library support
251 In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can
252 handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png and jpeg (postscript is
253 currently unsupported on Windows). To build Emacs with support for
254 them, the corresponding headers must be in the include path when the
255 configure script is run. This can be setup using environment
256 variables, or by specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line
257 to configure.bat. The configure script will report whether it was
258 able to detect the headers. If the results of this testing appear to be
259 incorrect, please look for details in the file config.log: it will show
260 the failed test programs and compiler error messages that should explain
261 what is wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers
262 are missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.)
264 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
265 functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the
266 PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a
267 library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be
268 unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can
269 not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than
270 restarting. See the variable `image-library-alist' to configure the
271 expected names of the libraries.
273 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
274 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
275 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
276 is in the PATH or otherwise accesible and that the binaries are
277 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
279 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
280 the GnuWin32 project. PNG, JPEG and TIFF libraries are also
281 included with GTK, which is installed along with other Free Software
282 that requires it. These are built with MinGW, but they can be used
283 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.
291 If GTK 2.0 is installed, addpm will arrange for its image libraries
292 to be on the DLL search path for Emacs.
296 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
297 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
298 GNU make. (If you are building out of CVS, say "make bootstrap" or
299 "nmake bootstrap" instead.)
301 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
302 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
303 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
304 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
305 until then we will just live with them.
307 With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have Make
308 execute several commands at once, like this:
310 gmake -j 4 XMFLAGS="-j 3"
312 The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make on
313 Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum number
314 of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows up to 4
315 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and up to 3 in
316 each one of the recursive Make's; you can use other numbers of jobs,
319 If you are building from CVS, the following commands will produce
320 the Info manuals (which are not part of the CVS repository):
326 Note that you will need makeinfo.exe (from the GNU Texinfo package)
327 in order for this command to succeed.
331 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
332 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
335 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
336 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
337 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
340 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
342 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
344 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
345 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
349 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
350 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API
351 headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
352 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
353 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
354 cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
355 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
357 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
358 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
359 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
360 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
361 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c. The W32 API
362 headers that come with Cygwin b20.1 are incomplete, and do not include
363 some definitions required by addsection.c, for instance. Also, older
364 releases of the W32 API headers from Anders Norlander contain a typo
365 in the definition of IMAGE_FIRST_SECTION in winnt.h, which
366 addsection.c relies on. Versions of w32api-xxx.zip from at least
367 1999-11-18 onwards are okay.
369 When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file
370 config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler
371 messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue,
372 please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from
375 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
376 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
377 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
378 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
380 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
381 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
383 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
386 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
387 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
389 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
394 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
395 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
396 compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC. (GDB for Windows
397 is available from the MinGW site, http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml.)
399 When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows
400 pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug
401 Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES
402 twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up
403 automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and
404 attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command,
405 where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the
406 Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and
407 only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to
408 the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal
411 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
412 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
413 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
414 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
415 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
416 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
417 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
419 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
420 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger,
421 Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a
422 readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB,
423 there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides
424 definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore,
425 the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.
427 The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger
428 via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should
429 be displayed in the console window that was opened when the
430 emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger
431 should be displayed in its "Debug" output window.
433 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
434 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, popup the QuickWatch
435 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
436 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
437 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
438 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
439 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
440 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
441 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
442 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
443 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
444 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
446 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
447 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
448 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
449 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
450 procedure and try using debug_print again.
452 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
453 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
454 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
455 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
456 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
457 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
458 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
462 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
464 GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
465 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
466 the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option)
469 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
470 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
471 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
472 GNU General Public License for more details.
474 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
475 along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the
476 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
477 Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.