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1 Building and Installing Emacs on Windows
2 (from 95 to 7 and beyond)
3
4 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5 See the end of the file for license conditions.
6
7 * For the impatient
8
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'':
12
13 Do not use this recipe with Cygwin. For building on Cygwin,
14 use the normal installation instructions, ../INSTALL.
15
16 If you have a Cygwin or MSYS port of Bash on your Path, you will be
17 better off removing it from PATH. (For details, search for "MSYS
18 sh.exe" below.)
19
20 1. Change to the `nt' directory (the directory of this file):
21
22 cd nt
23
24 2. Run configure.bat. From the COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE command prompt:
25
26 configure
27
28 from a Unixy shell prompt:
29
30 cmd /c configure.bat
31 or
32 command.com /c configure.bat
33
34 3. Run the Make utility suitable for your environment. If you build
35 with the Microsoft's Visual C compiler (but see notes about using
36 VC++ 8.0 and later below):
37
38 nmake
39
40 For the development environments based on GNU GCC (MinGW, MSYS,
41 Cygwin - but see notes about Cygwin make below), depending on how
42 Make is called, it could be:
43
44 make
45 or
46 mingw32-make
47 or
48 gnumake
49 or
50 gmake
51
52 (If you are building from Bazaar, say "make bootstrap" or "nmake
53 bootstrap" instead, and avoid using Cygwin make.)
54
55 With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have
56 Make execute several commands at once, like this:
57
58 gmake -j 2 XMFLAGS="-j 2"
59
60 The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make
61 on Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum
62 number of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows
63 up to 4 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and
64 up to 3 in each one of the recursive Make's.
65
66 4. Generate the Info manuals (only if you are building out of Bazaar,
67 and if you have makeinfo.exe installed):
68
69 make info
70
71 (change "make" to "nmake" if you use MSVC).
72
73 5. Install the produced binaries:
74
75 make install
76
77 That's it!
78
79 If these short instructions somehow fail, read the rest of this
80 file.
81
82 * Preliminaries
83
84 If you want to build a Cygwin port of Emacs, use the instructions in
85 the INSTALL file in the main Emacs directory (the parent of this
86 directory). These instructions are for building a native Windows
87 binary of Emacs.
88
89 If you used WinZip to unpack the distribution, we suggest to
90 remove the files and unpack again with a different program!
91 WinZip is known to create some subtle and hard to debug problems,
92 such as converting files to DOS CR-LF format, not creating empty
93 directories, etc. We suggest to use djtarnt.exe from the GNU FTP
94 site.
95
96 In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.BZR in the
97 parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of
98 "touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not
99 yet exist.
100
101 * Supported development environments
102
103 To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0, or
104 later up to 7.0, and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later
105 with MinGW and W32 API support and a port of GNU Make. You can use
106 the Cygwin ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and
107 libraries to build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least
108 since v1.3.3, include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral
109 part).
110
111 Note that building Emacs with Visual Studio 2005 (VC++ 8.0) and
112 later is not supported at this time, due to changes introduced by
113 Microsoft into the libraries shipped with the compiler.
114
115 The rest of this file assumes you have a working development
116 environment. If you just installed such an environment, try
117 building a trivial C "Hello world" program, and see if it works. If
118 it doesn't work, resolve that problem first! If you use Microsoft
119 Visual Studio .NET 2003, don't forget to run the VCVARS32.BAT batch
120 file from the `Bin' subdirectory of the directory where you have
121 installed VS.NET.
122
123 If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there
124 are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by
125 Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows
126 or sh.exe, a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, below is a list
127 of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether
128 they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port
129 of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin
130 will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of Cygwin style
131 paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of
132 Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap",
133 for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you
134 decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
135
136 In addition, using 4NT or TCC as your shell is known to fail the
137 build process, at least since 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the
138 default Windows shell, instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause
139 various problems, e.g., it is known to cause failures in commands
140 like "cmd /c FOO" in the Makefiles, because it thinks "/c" is a
141 Unix-style file name that needs conversion to the Windows format.
142 If you have MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the
143 use of cmd.exe instead of the MSYS sh.exe.
144
145 sh exists no sh
146
147 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
148 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
149 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
150 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
151 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
152 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
153 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
154 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
155 cygwin compiled make 3.80: okay[6] fails?[7]
156 cygwin compiled make 3.81: fails fails?[7]
157 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
158 mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay okay[7]
159 mingw32 compiled make 3.81: okay okay[8]
160
161 Notes:
162
163 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
164 emacs source with text!=binary.
165 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
166 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
167 versions of Cygwin.
168 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
169 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
170 May work if building emacs without leim.
171 [6] need to uncomment 3 lines in nt/gmake.defs that invoke `cygpath'
172 (look for "cygpath" near line 85 of gmake.defs).
173 [7] not recommended; please report if you try this combination.
174 [8] tested only on Windows XP.
175
176 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
177 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
178 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behavior. Unless
179 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
180 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
181 in the previous paragraph.
182
183 You will also need a copy of the POSIX cp, rm and mv programs. These
184 and other useful POSIX utilities can be obtained from one of several
185 projects:
186
187 * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
188 * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
189 * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
190 * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
191
192 If you build Emacs on 16-bit versions of Windows (9X or ME), we
193 suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is because the
194 native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the Emacs build
195 procedure tries very hard to support even such limited shells, but
196 as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on Windows 9X, we
197 cannot guarantee that it works without a more powerful shell.
198
199 Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
200 found at the Emacs Wiki:
201
202 http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
203
204 and on these URLs:
205
206 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
207 http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx
208
209 Both of those pages were written before Emacs switched from CVS to
210 Bazaar, but the parts about building Emacs still apply in Bazaar.
211 The second URL has instructions for building with MSVC, as well as
212 with MinGW, while the first URL covers only MinGW, but has more
213 details about it.
214
215 * Configuring
216
217 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
218 `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
219 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
220 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
221 options on the command line when invoking configure.
222
223 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
224 simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no
225 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
226 Do NOT use the --no-debug option to configure.bat unless you are
227 absolutely sure the produced binaries will never need to be run under
228 a debugger.
229
230 Because of limitations of the stock Windows command shells, special
231 care is needed to pass some characters in the arguments of the
232 --cflags and --ldflags options. Backslashes should not be used in
233 file names passed to the compiler and linker via these options. Use
234 forward slashes instead. If the arguments to these two options
235 include the `=' character, like when passing a -DFOO=bar preprocessor
236 option, the argument with the `=' character should be enclosed in
237 quotes, like this:
238
239 configure --cflags "-DFOO=bar"
240
241 Support for options that include the `=' character require "command
242 extensions" to be enabled. (They are enabled by default, but your
243 system administrator could have changed that. See "cmd /?" for
244 details.) If command extensions are disabled, a warning message might
245 be displayed informing you that "using parameters that include the =
246 character by enclosing them in quotes will not be supported."
247
248 You may also use the --cflags and --ldflags options to pass
249 additional parameters to the compiler and linker, respectively; they
250 are frequently used to pass -I and -L flags to specify supplementary
251 include and library directories. If a directory name includes
252 spaces, you will need to enclose it in quotes, as follows
253 -I"C:/Program Files/GnuTLS-2.10.1/include". Note that only the
254 directory name is enclosed in quotes, not the entire argument. Also
255 note that this functionality is only supported if command extensions
256 are available. If command extensions are disabled and you attempt to
257 use this functionality you may see the following warning message
258 "Error in --cflags argument: ... Backslashes and quotes cannot be
259 used with --cflags. Please use forward slashes for filenames and
260 paths (e.g. when passing directories to -I)."
261
262 N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
263 is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
264 suppressed because of limitations in the Windows 9X command.com shell.
265
266 You are encouraged to look at the file config.log which shows details
267 for failed tests, after configure.bat finishes. Any unexplained failure
268 should be investigated and perhaps reported as a bug (see the section
269 about reporting bugs in the file README in this directory and in the
270 Emacs manual).
271
272 * Optional image library support
273
274 In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can
275 handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png, jpeg and experimental
276 support for svg.
277
278 To build Emacs with support for them, the corresponding headers must
279 be in the include path when the configure script is run. This can
280 be setup using environment variables, or by specifying --cflags
281 -I... options on the command-line to configure.bat. The configure
282 script will report whether it was able to detect the headers. If
283 the results of this testing appear to be incorrect, please look for
284 details in the file config.log: it will show the failed test
285 programs and compiler error messages that should explain what is
286 wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers are
287 missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.)
288
289 Note that any file path passed to the compiler or linker must use
290 forward slashes; using backslashes will cause compiler warnings or
291 errors about unrecognized escape sequences.
292
293 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
294 functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the
295 PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a
296 library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be
297 unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can
298 not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than
299 restarting. See the variable `dynamic-library-alist' to configure the
300 expected names of the libraries.
301
302 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
303 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
304 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
305 is in the PATH or otherwise accessible and that the binaries are
306 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
307
308 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
309 the GnuWin32 project. PNG, JPEG and TIFF libraries are also
310 included with GTK, which is installed along with other Free Software
311 that requires it. These are built with MinGW, but they can be used
312 with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on
313 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html, under "How to Get
314 Images Support", for more details about installing image support
315 libraries. Note specifically that, due to some packaging snafus in
316 the GnuWin32-supplied image libraries, you will need to download
317 _source_ packages for some of the libraries in order to get the
318 header files necessary for building Emacs with image support.
319
320 If GTK 2.0 is installed, addpm will arrange for its image libraries
321 to be on the DLL search path for Emacs.
322
323 For PNG images, we recommend to use versions 1.4.x and later of
324 libpng, because previous versions had security issues. You can find
325 precompiled libraries and headers on the GTK download page for
326 Windows (http://www.gtk.org/download/win32.php).
327
328 Versions 1.4.0 and later of libpng are binary incompatible with
329 earlier versions, so Emacs will only look for libpng libraries which
330 are compatible with the version it was compiled against. That
331 version is given by the value of the Lisp variable `libpng-version';
332 e.g., 10403 means version 1.4.3. The variable `dynamic-library-alist'
333 is automatically set to name only those DLL names that are known to
334 be compatible with the version given by `libpng-version'. If PNG
335 support does not work for you even though you have the support DLL
336 installed, check the name of the installed DLL against
337 `dynamic-library-alist' and the value of `libpng-version', and
338 download compatible DLLs if needed.
339
340 * Optional GnuTLS support
341
342 If configure.bat finds the gnutls/gnutls.h file in the include path,
343 Emacs is built with GnuTLS support by default; to avoid that you can
344 pass the argument --without-gnutls.
345
346 In order to support GnuTLS at runtime, a GnuTLS-enabled Emacs must
347 be able to find the relevant DLLs during startup; failure to do so
348 is not an error, but GnuTLS won't be available to the running
349 session.
350
351 You can get pre-built binaries (including any required DLL and the
352 gnutls.h file) and an installer at http://josefsson.org/gnutls4win/.
353
354 * Experimental SVG support
355
356 SVG support is currently experimental, and not built by default.
357 Specify --with-svg and ensure you have all the dependencies in your
358 include path. Unless you have built a minimalist librsvg yourself
359 (untested), librsvg depends on a significant chunk of GTK+ to build,
360 plus a few Gnome libraries, libxml2, libbz2 and zlib at runtime. The
361 easiest way to obtain the dependencies required for building is to
362 download a pre-bundled GTK+ development environment for Windows.
363 GTK puts its header files all over the place, so you will need to
364 run pkgconfig to list the include path you will need (either passed
365 to configure.bat as --cflags options, or set in the environment).
366
367 To use librsvg at runtime, ensure that librsvg and its dependencies
368 are on your PATH. If you didn't build librsvg yourself, you will
369 need to check with where you downloaded it from for the
370 dependencies, as there are different build options. If it is a
371 short list, then it most likely only lists the immediate
372 dependencies of librsvg, but the dependencies themselves have
373 dependencies - so don't download individual libraries from GTK+,
374 download and install the whole thing. If you think you've got all
375 the dependencies and SVG support is still not working, check your
376 PATH for other libraries that shadow the ones you downloaded.
377 Libraries of the same name from different sources may not be
378 compatible, this problem was encountered with libbzip2 from GnuWin32
379 with libcroco from gnome.org.
380
381 If you can see etc/images/splash.svg, then you have managed to get
382 SVG support working. Congratulations for making it through DLL hell
383 to this point. You'll probably find that some SVG images crash
384 Emacs. Problems have been observed in some images that contain
385 text, they seem to be a problem in the Windows port of Pango, or
386 maybe a problem with the way Cairo or librsvg is using it that
387 doesn't show up on other platforms.
388
389 * Building
390
391 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
392 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
393 GNU make. (If you are building out of Bazaar, say "make bootstrap" or
394 "nmake bootstrap" instead.)
395
396 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
397 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
398 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
399 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
400 until then we will just live with them.
401
402 With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have Make
403 execute several commands at once, like this:
404
405 gmake -j 4 XMFLAGS="-j 3"
406
407 The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make on
408 Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum number
409 of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows up to 4
410 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and up to 3 in
411 each one of the recursive Make's; you can use other numbers of jobs,
412 if you wish.
413
414 If you are building from Bazaar, the following commands will produce
415 the Info manuals (which are not part of the Bazaar sources):
416
417 make info
418 or
419 nmake info
420
421 Note that you will need makeinfo.exe (from the GNU Texinfo package)
422 in order for this command to succeed.
423
424 * Installing
425
426 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
427 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
428 do you have.
429
430 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
431 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
432 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
433 make, like so:
434
435 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
436
437 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
438
439 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
440 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
441
442 * Make targets
443
444 The following make targets may be used by users building the source
445 distribution, or users who have checked out of Bazaar after
446 an initial bootstrapping.
447
448 make
449 Builds Emacs from the available sources and pre-compiled lisp files.
450
451 make install
452 Installs programs to the bin directory, and runs addpm to create
453 Start Menu icons.
454
455 make clean
456 Removes object and executable files produced by the build process in
457 the current configuration. After make clean, you can rebuild with
458 the same configuration using make.
459
460 make distclean
461 In addition to the files removed by make clean, this also removes
462 Makefiles and other generated files to get back to the state of a
463 freshly unpacked source distribution. Note that this will not remove
464 installed files, or the results of builds performed with different
465 compiler or optimization options than the current configuration.
466 After make distclean, it is necessary to run configure.bat followed
467 by make to rebuild.
468
469 make cleanall
470 Removes object and executable files that may have been created by
471 previous builds with different configure options, in addition to
472 the files produced by the current configuration.
473
474 make realclean
475 Removes the installed files in the bin subdirectory in addition to
476 the files removed by make cleanall.
477
478 make dist
479 Builds Emacs from the available sources and pre-compiled lisp files.
480 Packages Emacs binaries as full distribution and barebin distribution.
481
482 The following targets are intended only for use with the Bazaar sources.
483
484 make bootstrap
485 Creates a temporary emacs binary with lisp source files and
486 uses it to compile the lisp files. Once the lisp files are built,
487 emacs is redumped with the compiled lisp.
488
489 make recompile
490 Recompiles any changed lisp files after an update. This saves
491 doing a full bootstrap after every update. If this or a subsequent
492 make fail, you probably need to perform a full bootstrap, though
493 running this target multiple times may eventually sort out the
494 interdependencies.
495
496 make maintainer-clean
497 Removes everything that can be recreated, including compiled lisp
498 files, to get back to the state of a fresh Bazaar tree. After make
499 maintainer-clean, it is necessary to run configure.bat and make
500 bootstrap to rebuild. Occasionally it may be necessary to run this
501 target after an update.
502
503 * Creating binary distributions
504
505 Binary distributions (full and barebin distributions) can be
506 automatically built and packaged from source tarballs or a bzr
507 checkout.
508
509 When building Emacs binary distributions, the --distfiles argument
510 to configure.bat specifies files to be included in the bin directory
511 of the binary distributions. This is intended for libraries that are
512 not built as part of Emacs, e.g. image libraries.
513
514 For example, specifying
515
516 --distfiles D:\distfiles\libXpm.dll
517
518 results in libXpm.dll being copied from D:\distfiles to the
519 bin directory before packaging starts.
520
521 Multiple files can be specified using multiple --distfiles arguments:
522
523 --distfiles D:\distfiles\libXpm.dll --distfiles C:\jpeglib\jpeg.dll
524
525 For packaging the binary distributions, the 'dist' make target uses
526 7-Zip (http://www.7-zip.org), which must be installed and available
527 on the Windows Path.
528
529
530 * Trouble-shooting
531
532 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
533 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API
534 headers. Additionally, Cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
535 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
536 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
537 Cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
538 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
539
540 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
541 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
542 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
543 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
544 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c.
545 Older versions of the W32 API headers that come with Cygwin and MinGW
546 may be missing some definitions required by Emacs, or broken in other
547 ways. In particular, uniscribe APIs were added to MinGW CVS only on
548 2006-03-26, so releases from before then cannot be used.
549
550 When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file
551 config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler
552 messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue,
553 please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from
554 config.log, as bugs.
555
556 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
557 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
558 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
559 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
560
561 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
562 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
563
564 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
565 --ldflags -mwin32
566
567 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
568 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
569
570 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
571 release.
572
573 * Debugging
574
575 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
576 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
577 compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC. (GDB for Windows
578 is available from the MinGW site, http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml.)
579
580 When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows
581 pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug
582 Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES
583 twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up
584 automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and
585 attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command,
586 where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the
587 Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and
588 only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to
589 the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal
590 error.
591
592 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
593 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
594 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
595 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
596 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
597 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
598 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
599
600 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
601 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger,
602 Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a
603 readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB,
604 there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides
605 definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore,
606 the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.
607
608 The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger
609 via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should
610 be displayed in the console window that was opened when the
611 emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger
612 should be displayed in its "Debug" output window.
613
614 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
615 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, pop up the QuickWatch
616 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
617 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
618 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
619 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
620 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
621 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
622 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
623 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
624 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
625 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
626
627 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
628 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
629 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
630 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
631 procedure and try using debug_print again.
632
633 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
634 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
635 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
636 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
637 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
638 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
639 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
640 threads.
641
642 \f
643 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
644
645 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
646 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
647 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
648 (at your option) any later version.
649
650 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
651 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
652 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
653 GNU General Public License for more details.
654
655 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
656 along with GNU Emacs. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.