Emacs.app on Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6

October 7th, 2009

Update: A 64-bit version of Emacs can now be compiled from source.

With the release of Snow Leopard, the included Emacs binary was not compiled with Carbon or Cocoa support. So, if a native OS X GUI is desired, compiling your own Emacs.app may be worthwhile. That’s the route I’ve taken. The Emacs developers are making improvements to the Cocoa version while dropping support for Carbon, and a 64-bit version should be able to compile from source. I’ll update this post as I tweak my Emacs.app on Snow Leopard.

64-bit Version

Download the the “latest” source from http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs (I personally used git. Known checkouts to work: Oct 12, 2009, Oct 24, 2009):

$ git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/emacs.git

Run ‘./configure’:

$ cd emacs
$ ./configure --with-ns

Compile and create Emacs.app:

$ make install

Move ‘./emacs/nextstep/Emacs.app’ to ‘/Applications/’:

$ mv ./nextstep/Emacs.app /Applications/

32-bit Version

If the 64-bit version doesn’t compile, you can compile a 32-bit version by doing:

$ CC="gcc -arch i386" ./configure --with-ns

Note: There is more information about compiling a 64-bit version of Emacs.app at this blog post, this mailing list thread, and this blog post.

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3 Responses to “Emacs.app on Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6”

  1. Wangden says:
    November 2, 2009 at 2:39 pm

    FWIW, the October 24 commit linked above (cea9d0a2ed1eb3501909c262841acd20f86587b4) won't configure for me—it can't find the libraries libjpeg, libpng, libgif/libungif, or libtiff. (I haven't tried installing those libraries or telling configure to leave them out.)

    The October 12 (115da71cd) configures and compiles fine.

    This is on a 64-bit Snow Leopard system.

    W

  2. Jeff Putsch says:
    October 21, 2009 at 7:37 pm

    Thanks for the heads up and clear instructions.

    As of Oct. 21, 2009, the above instructions don't quite work. I had to modify them to be:

    <pre>
    git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/emacs.git
    cd emacs
    git git checkout 115da71cd94d24194e72cf23f00810de6bfcbd84
    </pre>

    Then continue with the configure and make steps.

    It appears something in the configure scripts has changed and now fails to recognize Snow Leopard as a valid platform.

    Jeff.

  3. Emacs.app on Mac OS X Leopard « Michael V. O’Brien says:
    October 7, 2009 at 12:41 pm

    [...] Update: I have another blog post for Mac OS X Snow Leopard. [...]