Building and Installing Emacs on 64-bit MS-Windows using MSYS2 and MinGW-w64 Copyright (c) 2015-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See the end of the file for license conditions. This document describes how to compile a 64-bit GNU Emacs using MSYS2 and MinGW-w64. For instructions for building a 32-bit Emacs using MSYS and MinGW, see the file INSTALL in this directory. Do not use this recipe with Cygwin. For building on Cygwin, use the normal installation instructions in ../INSTALL. * Requirements The total space required is 3GB: 1.8GB for MSYS2 / MinGW-w64 and 1.2GB for Emacs with the full repository, or less if you're using a release tarball. * Set up the MinGW-w64 / MSYS2 build environment MinGW-w64 provides a complete runtime for projects built with GCC for 64-bit Windows -- it's located at http://mingw-w64.org/. MSYS2 is a Cygwin-derived software distribution for Windows which provides build tools for MinGW-w64 -- see http://msys2.github.io/. ** Download and install MinGW-w64 and MSYS2 You can download the x86_64 version of MSYS2 (i.e. msys2-x86_64-.exe) from https://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2/files/Base/x86_64 Run this file to install MSYS2 in your preferred directory, e.g. the default C:\msys64 -- this will install MinGW-w64 also. Note that directory names containing spaces may cause problems. In the sequel we denote by c:\MSYS\INSTALL\DIR\msys64 the directory where MSYS2 is installed, e.g. C:\msys64 by default. * Configure your MSWindows PATH variable Then you'll need to add the following directories to your Windows PATH environment variable: c:\MSYS\INSTALL\DIR\msys64\usr\bin;c:\MSYS\INSTALL\DIR\msys64\mingw64\bin where c:\MSYS\INSTALL\DIR\msys64 depends on your MSYS2 installation, and is c:\msys64 by default. You can do this through Control Panel / System and Security / System / Advanced system settings / Environment Variables / Edit path. Adding these directories to your PATH tells Emacs where to find the DLLs it needs to run, and some optional commands like grep and find. These commands will also be available at the Windows console. Concerning the find command see also the last step about configuring your init file to get an MSWindows find port. ** Download and install the necessary packages Run msys2_shell.bat in your MSYS2 directory and you will see a BASH window opened. In the BASH prompt, use the following command to install the necessary packages (you can copy and paste it into the shell with Shift + Insert): for w in msys/msys2-launcher-git \ msys/m4 \ msys/autoconf \ msys/grep \ msys/findutils \ mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config \ mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-make \ mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain \ mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-xpm-nox \ mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-libtiff \ mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-giflib \ mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-libpng \ mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-libjpeg-turbo \ mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-librsvg \ mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-liblcms2 \ mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-libxml2 \ mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-gnutls \ mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-zlib; do pacman -S $w; done Answer Y (for yes) to all questions when the package is not up to date, and n (for no) otherwise. The packages include the base developer tools (autoconf, grep, make, etc.), the compiler toolchain (gcc, gdb, etc.), several image libraries, an XML library, the GnuTLS (transport layer security) library, and zlib for decompressing text. Only the packages up to xpm-nox are required; the rest are optional. You can select only part of the libraries if you don't need them all. ** Check your MSYS2 fstab file make sure that your fstab file (c:\MSYS\INSTALL\DIR\msys64\etc\fstab) file contains the following lines (starting a column 0 in the fstab file): c:/MSYS/INSTALL/DIR/msys64/mingw64/bin /mingw64/bin ntfs binary,noacl 0 0 c:/MSYS/INSTALL/DIR/msys64/mingw32/bin /mingw32/bin ntfs binary,noacl 0 0 Please note that only the first line is needed for 64bit compilation, the second one is for a complete fstab file w.r.t. 32bit compilation. If there is a space in c:\MSYS\INSTALL\DIR it shall be replaced by \040. For instance, if MSYS is installed under "C:\Program Files\msys64" there must be this line: C:/Program\040Files/msys64/mingw64/bin /mingw64/bin ntfs binary,noacl 0 0 Anyway, avoiding to have any space in the path is preferable. ** Configure your MSYS2 PATH variable for application running from an mingw64 console When you launch the mingw64.exe console from the c:\MSYS\INSTALL\DIR\msys64, and type echo "$PATH" You must have /mingw64/bin and /usr/bin in the paths list in this order. Otherwise, you will need to exit the MINGW64 console and edit your ~/.bashrc file, where ~ denote c:\MSYS\INSTALL\DIR\msys64\home\%USERNAME%, to have the correct PATH variable from MSYS/MINGW32/MINGW64 consoles: In this cas, please make sure that ~/.bashrc contains some statement like: case x$MSYSTEM in xMINGW64) PATH="/mingw64/bin:/usr/bin:$PATH" ;; xMINGW32) PATH="/mingw32/bin:/usr/bin:$PATH" ;; xMSYS) PATH="/usr/bin:$PATH" ;; esac Actually, for the Emacs build only the MINGW64 is useful. There could other cases for MSYSTEM envvar equal to MSYS or to MINGW32. You now have a complete build environment for Emacs. * Install Git (optional) and disable autocrlf If you're going to be building the development version of Emacs from the Git repository, and you don't already have Git on your system, you can install it in your MSYS2 environment with: pacman -S git The autocrlf feature of Git may interfere with the configure file, so it is best to disable this feature by running the command: git config core.autocrlf false * Get the Emacs source code Now you can either get an existing release version of the Emacs source code from the GNU ftp site, or get the more current version and history from the Git repository. You can always find the most recent information on these sources from the GNU Savannah Emacs site, https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs. ** From the FTP site The Emacs ftp site is located at https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/ - download the version you want to build and put the file into a location like C:\emacs\, then uncompress it with tar. This will put the Emacs source into a folder like C:\emacs\emacs-24.5: cd /c/emacs tar xJf emacs-24.5.tar.xz ** From the Git repository To download the Git repository, do something like the following -- this will put the Emacs source into C:\emacs\emacs-26: mkdir /c/emacs cd /c/emacs git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs.git emacs-26 (We recommend using the command shown on Savannah Emacs project page.) * Build Emacs Now you're ready to build and install Emacs with autogen, configure, make, and make install. First we need to switch to the MinGW-w64 environment. Exit the MSYS2 BASH console and run mingw64.exe in the C:\MSYS\INSTALL\DIR\msys64 folder, then cd back to your Emacs source directory, e.g.: cd /c/emacs/emacs-26 ** Run autogen If you are building the development sources, run autogen to generate the configure script (note: this step is not necessary if you are using a release source tarball, as the configure file is included): ./autogen.sh ** Run configure Now you can run configure, which will build the various Makefiles -- note that the example given here is just a simple one - for more information on the options available please see the INSTALL file in this directory. The '--prefix' option specifies a location for the resulting binary files, which 'make install' will use - in this example we set it to C:\emacs\emacs-26. If a prefix is not specified the files will be put in the standard Unix directories located in your C:\msys64 directory, but this is not recommended. Note also that we need to disable Imagemagick because Emacs does not yet support it on Windows. PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/mingw64/lib/pkgconfig \ ./configure --prefix=/c/emacs/emacs-26 --without-imagemagick ** Run make This will compile Emacs and build the executables, putting them in the src directory: make To speed up the process, you can try running make -jN where N is the number of cores in your system -- if your MSYS2 make supports parallel execution it will run significantly faster. ** Run make install Now you can run "make install", which will copy the executable and other files to the location specified in the configure step. This will create the bin, libexec, share, and var directories: make install You can also say make install prefix=/c/somewhere to install them somewhere else. * Test Emacs To test it out, run ./bin/runemacs.exe -Q and if all went well, you will have a new 64-bit version of Emacs. * Make a shortcut To make a shortcut to run the new Emacs, right click on the location where you want to put it, e.g. the Desktop, select New / Shortcut, then select runemacs.exe in the bin folder of the new Emacs, and give it a name. You can set any command line options by right clicking on the resulting shortcut, select Properties, then add any options to the Target command, e.g. --debug-init. * Configure your init file for Emacs to get a findutils windows port As far as find is concerned, at this stage you have configured the MSWindows PATH envvar to have c:\MSYS\INSTALL\DIR\msys64\usr\bin in it. You should have done that in a way that c:\MSYS\INSTALL\DIR\msys64\usr\bin is after C:\Windows\System32 in the PATH, otherwise the MSYS2 find.exe will be used instead of the MSWindows find.exe by other MSWindows application and this may cause some problem in your MSWindows environment --- although nobody has ever reported such a trouble. As far as Emacs is concerned, the lasy way is to use the MSYS2 find utility despit the PATH envvar by setting in your init file the following: (setq grep-program "c:/MSYS/INSTALL/DIR/msys64/usr/bin/find.exe") Actually, it is better to work a little bit more and use a MSWindows port rather than the MSYS find. See why here https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=27393 For instance this port can be used. https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/findutils-4.2.30-5-w64-bin.zip/download Then add to your init file lines like these : (setq find-program "c:/PATH/TO/FIND/PORT/find.exe") where "c:/PATH/TO/FIND/PORT/" is the place where you have installed this find MSWindows port. * Credits Thanks to Chris Zheng for the original build outline as used by the emacsbinw64 project, located at: https://sourceforge.net/p/emacsbinw64/wiki/Build%20guideline%20for%20MSYS2-MinGW-w64%20system/ * License This file is part of GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with GNU Emacs. If not, see .