This directory tree holds version 30.0.50 of GNU Emacs, the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display IDE / text editor.
The file INSTALL
in this directory instructs how to build and install GNU Emacs on various systems, once you have unpacked or checked out the entire Emacs file tree.
See the file etc/NEWS
for information on new features and other user-visible changes in recent versions of Emacs.
The file etc/PROBLEMS
contains information on many common problems that occur in building, installing and running Emacs.
The file CONTRIBUTE
contains information on contributing to Emacs as a developer.
You may encounter bugs in this release. If you do, please report them; your bug reports are valuable contributions to the FSF, since they allow us to notice and fix problems on machines we don't have, or in code we don't use often. Please send bug reports to the mailing list bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. If possible, use M-x report-emacs-bug.
See the "Bugs" section of the Emacs manual for more information on how
to report bugs. (The file BUGS
in this directory explains how you
can find and read that section using the Info files that come with
Emacs.) For a list of mailing lists related to Emacs, see
https://savannah.gnu.org/mail/?group=emacs. For the complete
list of GNU mailing lists, see https://lists.gnu.org/.
The etc/
subdirectory contains several other files, named in capital letters, which you might consider looking at when installing GNU Emacs.
The file configure
is a shell / bash script to acclimate Emacs to the oddities of your processor and operating system.
It creates the Makefile
file (a script for the make
tool), which automates the
process of building and installing Emacs.
See INSTALL
for more detailed information.
The file configure.ac
is the input used by the autoconf
program to
construct the configure
script.
The shell script autogen.sh
generates configure
and other files by
running Autoconf (which in turn uses GNU m4
), and configures files in
the .git/
subdirectory if you are using git
or on Windows Git Bash. If you want to use it,
you will need to install recent versions of these build tools.
This should be needed only if you edit files like configure.ac
that specify Emacs's autobuild procedure.
The file Makefile.in
is a template used by configure
to generate the Makefile
The file make-dist
is a shell script to build a distribution .tar
file from the current Emacs tree, containing only those files appropriate for distribution. If you make extensive changes to Emacs,
this script will help you distribute your version to others.
There are several subdirectories:
src/
holds the C code for Emacs (the Emacs LISP interpreter and its primitives, the redisplay code, and some basic editing functions).
lisp/
holds the Emacs LISP code for Emacs (most everything else).
leim/
holds the original source files for the generated files in lisp/leim
.
These form the library of Emacs input methods, required to type international characters that can't be directly produced by your keyboard.
lib/
holds source code for libraries used by Emacs and its utilities
lib-src/
holds the source code for some utility programs for use by or with Emacs, like movemail
and etags
.
lwlib/
holds the sources of the Lucid Widget Library used on X.
oldXMenu/
source files from X11R2 XMenu library, used in non-toolkit builds.
etc/
holds miscellaneous architecture-independent data files Emacs uses, like the tutorial text and toolbar images.
The contents of the lisp/
, leim/
, info/
, and doc/
subdirectories are architecture-independent too.
info/
holds the Info documentation tree for Emacs.
doc/emacs/
holds the source code for the Emacs Manual. If you modify the manual sources, you will need the makeinfo
tool to regenerate the updated manual.
makeinfo
is a part of the GNU Texinfo package; you need a suitably recent version of texinfo
.
doc/lispref/
holds the source code for the Emacs LISP reference manual.
doc/lispintro/
holds the source code for the Introduction to Programming in Emacs LISP documentation.
msdos/
holds configuration files for compiling Emacs under MS-DOS.
nextstep/
holds instructions and some other files for compiling the Nextstep port of Emacs, for GNUstep and macOS Cocoa.
nt/
holds code and documentation for building Emacs on Microsoft Windows.
test/
holds tests for various aspects of Emacs's functionality.
modules/
holds the modhelp.py
helper Python script.
admin/
holds files used by Emacs developers, and Unicode data files.
build-aux/
holds auxiliary files used during the build.
m4/
holds Autoconf macros used for generating the configure
script.
java/
holds the Java code for the Emacs port to Android.
cross/
holds Makefiles and an additional copy of gnulib used to build Emacs for Android devices.
exec/
holds the source code to several helper executables used to run user-installed programs on Android.
Building Emacs on non-POSIX platforms requires tools that aren't part of the standard distribution of the OS. The platform-specific README
files and installation instructions should list the required tools.
NOTE ON COPYRIGHT YEARS
In copyright notices where the copyright holder is the Free Software Foundation, then where a range of years appears, this is an inclusive range that applies to every year in the range. For example: 2005-2008 represents the years 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008.
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 https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.