1 Building and Installing Emacs on Windows
2 (from 95 to 7 and beyond)
4 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5 See the end of the file for license conditions.
9 Here are the concise instructions for configuring and building the
10 native Windows binary of Emacs, for those who want to skip the
11 complex explanations and ``just do it'':
13 Do not use this recipe with Cygwin. For building on Cygwin,
14 use the normal installation instructions, ../INSTALL.
16 1. Change to the `nt' directory (the directory of this file):
20 2. Run configure.bat. From the COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE command prompt:
24 from a Unixy shell prompt:
28 command.com /c configure.bat
30 3. Run the Make utility suitable for your environment. If you build
31 with the Microsoft's Visual C compiler (but see notes about using
32 VC++ 8.0 and later below):
36 For the development environments based on GNU GCC (MinGW, MSYS,
37 Cygwin - but see notes about Cygwin make below), depending on how
38 Make is called, it could be:
48 (If you are building from Bazaar, say "make bootstrap" or "nmake
49 bootstrap" instead, and avoid using Cygwin make.)
51 With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have
52 Make execute several commands at once, like this:
54 gmake -j 2 XMFLAGS="-j 2"
56 The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make
57 on Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum
58 number of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows
59 up to 4 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and
60 up to 3 in each one of the recursive Make's.
62 4. Generate the Info manuals (only if you are building out of Bazaar,
63 and if you have makeinfo.exe installed):
67 (change "make" to "nmake" if you use MSVC).
69 5. Install the produced binaries:
75 If these short instructions somehow fail, read the rest of this
80 If you want to build a Cygwin port of Emacs, use the instructions in
81 the INSTALL file in the main Emacs directory (the parent of this
82 directory). These instructions are for building a native Windows
85 If you used WinZip to unpack the distribution, we suggest to
86 remove the files and unpack again with a different program!
87 WinZip is known to create some subtle and hard to debug problems,
88 such as converting files to DOS CR-LF format, not creating empty
89 directories, etc. We suggest to use djtarnt.exe from the GNU FTP
92 In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.BZR in the
93 parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of
94 "touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not
97 * Supported development environments
99 To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0, or
100 later up to 7.0, and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later
101 with MinGW and W32 API support and a port of GNU Make. You can use
102 the Cygwin ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and
103 libraries to build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least
104 since v1.3.3, include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral
107 Note that building Emacs with Visual Studio 2005 (VC++ 8.0) and
108 later is not supported at this time, due to changes introduced by
109 Microsoft into the libraries shipped with the compiler.
111 The rest of this file assumes you have a working development
112 environment. If you just installed such an environment, try
113 building a trivial C "Hello world" program, and see if it works. If
114 it doesn't work, resolve that problem first! If you use Microsoft
115 Visual Studio .NET 2003, don't forget to run the VCVARS32.BAT batch
116 file from the `Bin' subdirectory of the directory where you have
119 If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there
120 are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by
121 Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows
122 or sh.exe, a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, below is a list
123 of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether
124 they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port
125 of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin
126 will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of Cygwin style
127 paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of
128 Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap",
129 for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you
130 decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
132 In addition, using 4NT or TCC as your shell is known to fail the build
133 process, at least since 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the default
134 Windows shell, instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various
135 problems. If you have MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to
136 force the use of cmd.exe instead of sh.exe.
140 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
141 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
142 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
143 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
144 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
145 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
146 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
147 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
148 cygwin compiled make 3.80: okay[6] fails?[7]
149 cygwin compiled make 3.81: fails fails?[7]
150 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
151 mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay okay[7]
152 mingw32 compiled make 3.81: okay okay[8]
156 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
157 emacs source with text!=binary.
158 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
159 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
161 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
162 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
163 May work if building emacs without leim.
164 [6] need to uncomment 3 lines in nt/gmake.defs that invoke `cygpath'
165 (look for "cygpath" near line 85 of gmake.defs).
166 [7] not recommended; please report if you try this combination.
167 [8] tested only on Windows XP.
169 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
170 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
171 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behavior. Unless
172 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
173 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
174 in the previous paragraph.
176 You will also need a copy of the POSIX cp, rm and mv programs. These
177 and other useful POSIX utilities can be obtained from one of several
180 * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
181 * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
182 * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
183 * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
185 If you build Emacs on 16-bit versions of Windows (9X or ME), we
186 suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is because the
187 native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the Emacs build
188 procedure tries very hard to support even such limited shells, but
189 as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on Windows 9X, we
190 cannot guarantee that it works without a more powerful shell.
192 Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
193 found at the Emacs Wiki:
195 http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
199 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
200 http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx
202 Both of those pages were written before Emacs switched from CVS to
203 Bazaar, but the parts about building Emacs still apply in Bazaar.
204 The second URL has instructions for building with MSVC, as well as
205 with MinGW, while the first URL covers only MinGW, but has more
210 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
211 `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
212 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
213 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
214 options on the command line when invoking configure.
216 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
217 simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no
218 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
219 Do NOT use the --no-debug option to configure.bat unless you are
220 absolutely sure the produced binaries will never need to be run under
223 Because of limitations of the stock Windows command shells, special
224 care is needed to pass some characters in the arguments of the
225 --cflags and --ldflags options. Backslashes should not be used in
226 file names passed to the compiler and linker via these options. Use
227 forward slashes instead. If the arguments to these two options
228 include the `=' character, like when passing a -DFOO=bar preprocessor
229 option, the argument with the `=' character should be enclosed in
232 configure --cflags "-DFOO=bar"
234 Support for options that include the `=' character require "command
235 extensions" to be enabled. (They are enabled by default, but your
236 system administrator could have changed that. See "cmd /?" for
237 details.) If command extensions are disabled, a warning message might
238 be displayed informing you that "using parameters that include the =
239 character by enclosing them in quotes will not be supported."
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 suppressed 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, jpeg and experimental
257 To build Emacs with support for them, the corresponding headers must
258 be in the include path when the configure script is run. This can
259 be setup using environment variables, or by specifying --cflags
260 -I... options on the command-line to configure.bat. The configure
261 script will report whether it was able to detect the headers. If
262 the results of this testing appear to be incorrect, please look for
263 details in the file config.log: it will show the failed test
264 programs and compiler error messages that should explain what is
265 wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers are
266 missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.)
268 Note that any file path passed to the compiler or linker must use
269 forward slashes; using backslashes will cause compiler warnings or
270 errors about unrecognized escape sequences.
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 `dynamic-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 For PNG images, we recommend to use versions 1.4.x and later of
303 libpng, because previous versions had security issues. You can find
304 precompiled libraries and headers on the GTK download page for
305 Windows (http://www.gtk.org/download-windows.html).
307 Versions 1.4.0 and later of libpng are binary incompatible with
308 earlier versions, so Emacs will only look for libpng libraries which
309 are compatible with the version it was compiled against. That
310 version is given by the value of the Lisp variable `libpng-version';
311 e.g., 10403 means version 1.4.3. The variable `dynamic-library-alist'
312 is automatically set to name only those DLL names that are known to
313 be compatible with the version given by `libpng-version'. If PNG
314 support does not work for you even though you have the support DLL
315 installed, check the name of the installed DLL against
316 `dynamic-library-alist' and the value of `libpng-version', and
317 download compatible DLLs if needed.
319 * Optional GnuTLS support
321 You can build Emacs with GnuTLS support. Put the gnutls/gnutls.h header in
322 the include path and link to the appropriate libraries (gnutls.dll and
323 gcrypt.dll) with the --lib option.
325 You can get pre-built binaries and an installer at
326 http://josefsson.org/gnutls4win/.
328 * Experimental SVG support
330 SVG support is currently experimental, and not built by default.
331 Specify --with-svg and ensure you have all the dependencies in your
332 include path. Unless you have built a minimalist librsvg yourself
333 (untested), librsvg depends on a significant chunk of GTK+ to build,
334 plus a few Gnome libraries, libxml2, libbz2 and zlib at runtime. The
335 easiest way to obtain the dependencies required for building is to
336 download a pre-bundled GTK+ development environment for Windows.
337 GTK puts its header files all over the place, so you will need to
338 run pkgconfig to list the include path you will need (either passed
339 to configure.bat as --cflags options, or set in the environment).
341 To use librsvg at runtime, ensure that librsvg and its dependencies
342 are on your PATH. If you didn't build librsvg yourself, you will
343 need to check with where you downloaded it from for the
344 dependencies, as there are different build options. If it is a
345 short list, then it most likely only lists the immediate
346 dependencies of librsvg, but the dependencies themselves have
347 dependencies - so don't download individual libraries from GTK+,
348 download and install the whole thing. If you think you've got all
349 the dependencies and SVG support is still not working, check your
350 PATH for other libraries that shadow the ones you downloaded.
351 Libraries of the same name from different sources may not be
352 compatible, this problem was encountered with libbzip2 from GnuWin32
353 with libcroco from gnome.org.
355 If you can see etc/images/splash.svg, then you have managed to get
356 SVG support working. Congratulations for making it through DLL hell
357 to this point. You'll probably find that some SVG images crash
358 Emacs. Problems have been observed in some images that contain
359 text, they seem to be a problem in the Windows port of Pango, or
360 maybe a problem with the way Cairo or librsvg is using it that
361 doesn't show up on other platforms.
365 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
366 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
367 GNU make. (If you are building out of Bazaar, say "make bootstrap" or
368 "nmake bootstrap" instead.)
370 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
371 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
372 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
373 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
374 until then we will just live with them.
376 With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have Make
377 execute several commands at once, like this:
379 gmake -j 4 XMFLAGS="-j 3"
381 The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make on
382 Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum number
383 of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows up to 4
384 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and up to 3 in
385 each one of the recursive Make's; you can use other numbers of jobs,
388 If you are building from Bazaar, the following commands will produce
389 the Info manuals (which are not part of the Bazaar sources):
395 Note that you will need makeinfo.exe (from the GNU Texinfo package)
396 in order for this command to succeed.
400 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
401 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
404 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
405 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
406 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
409 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
411 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
413 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
414 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
418 The following make targets may be used by users building the source
419 distribution, or users who have checked out of Bazaar after
420 an initial bootstrapping.
423 Builds Emacs from the available sources and pre-compiled lisp files.
426 Installs programs to the bin directory, and runs addpm to create
430 Removes object and executable files produced by the build process in
431 the current configuration. After make clean, you can rebuild with
432 the same configuration using make.
435 In addition to the files removed by make clean, this also removes
436 Makefiles and other generated files to get back to the state of a
437 freshly unpacked source distribution. Note that this will not remove
438 installed files, or the results of builds performed with different
439 compiler or optimization options than the current configuration.
440 After make distclean, it is necessary to run configure.bat followed
444 Removes object and executable files that may have been created by
445 previous builds with different configure options, in addition to
446 the files produced by the current configuration.
449 Removes the installed files in the bin subdirectory in addition to
450 the files removed by make cleanall.
453 Builds Emacs from the available sources and pre-compiled lisp files.
454 Packages Emacs binaries as full distribution and barebin distribution.
456 The following targets are intended only for use with the Bazaar sources.
459 Creates a temporary emacs binary with lisp source files and
460 uses it to compile the lisp files. Once the lisp files are built,
461 emacs is redumped with the compiled lisp.
464 Recompiles any changed lisp files after an update. This saves
465 doing a full bootstrap after every update. If this or a subsequent
466 make fail, you probably need to perform a full bootstrap, though
467 running this target multiple times may eventually sort out the
470 make maintainer-clean
471 Removes everything that can be recreated, including compiled lisp
472 files, to get back to the state of a fresh Bazaar tree. After make
473 maintainer-clean, it is necessary to run configure.bat and make
474 bootstrap to rebuild. Occasionally it may be necessary to run this
475 target after an update.
477 * Creating binary distributions
479 Binary distributions (full and barebin distributions) can be
480 automatically built and packaged from source tarballs or a bzr
483 When building Emacs binary distributions, the --distfiles argument
484 to configure.bat specifies files to be included in the bin directory
485 of the binary distributions. This is intended for libraries that are
486 not built as part of Emacs, e.g. image libraries.
488 For example, specifying
490 --distfiles D:\distfiles\libXpm.dll
492 results in libXpm.dll being copied from D:\distfiles to the
493 bin directory before packaging starts.
495 Multiple files can be specified using multiple --distfiles arguments:
497 --distfiles D:\distfiles\libXpm.dll --distfiles C:\jpeglib\jpeg.dll
499 For packaging the binary distributions, the 'dist' make target uses
500 7-Zip (http://www.7-zip.org), which must be installed and available
506 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
507 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API
508 headers. Additionally, Cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
509 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
510 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
511 Cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
512 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
514 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
515 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
516 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
517 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
518 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c.
519 Older versions of the W32 API headers that come with Cygwin and MinGW
520 may be missing some definitions required by Emacs, or broken in other
521 ways. In particular, uniscribe APIs were added to MinGW CVS only on
522 2006-03-26, so releases from before then cannot be used.
524 When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file
525 config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler
526 messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue,
527 please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from
530 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
531 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
532 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
533 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
535 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
536 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
538 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
541 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
542 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
544 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
549 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
550 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
551 compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC. (GDB for Windows
552 is available from the MinGW site, http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml.)
554 When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows
555 pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug
556 Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES
557 twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up
558 automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and
559 attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command,
560 where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the
561 Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and
562 only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to
563 the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal
566 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
567 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
568 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
569 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
570 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
571 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
572 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
574 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
575 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger,
576 Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a
577 readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB,
578 there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides
579 definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore,
580 the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.
582 The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger
583 via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should
584 be displayed in the console window that was opened when the
585 emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger
586 should be displayed in its "Debug" output window.
588 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
589 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, pop up the QuickWatch
590 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
591 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
592 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
593 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
594 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
595 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
596 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
597 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
598 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
599 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
601 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
602 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
603 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
604 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
605 procedure and try using debug_print again.
607 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
608 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
609 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
610 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
611 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
612 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
613 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
617 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
619 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
620 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
621 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
622 (at your option) any later version.
624 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
625 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
626 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
627 GNU General Public License for more details.
629 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
630 along with GNU Emacs. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.