Very happy with Emacs pretest
I decided to use pretest version of Emacs instead of a stable release and so far it turned out to be a pleasant experience.
For those who don’t have any idea, you can visit http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/ and download the latest version. Compiling and using should not be a problem. But still for newcomers, following are the steps:
-
Download and extract the latest pretest version.
wget -Nc --show-progress http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-25.0.92.tar.xz tar xvJf emacs-25.0.92.tar.xz
-
Configure and compile.
cd emacs-25-0.92
Make sure you have
/opt/emacs-pretest
directory present.sudo mkdir -p /opt/emacs-pretest
Configure the build environment
./configure --prefix=/opt/emacs-pretest --host=x86_64-fedora23-linux-gnu
Build from source
make
make
will take time depending on your system specsIf you are not aware of the flags:
-
--prefix
makes sure that the final binary(with directory structure) will be copied inside/opt/emacs-pretest/
when you runmake install
-
--host
ensures that when you doM-x version
, it should return ‘x86_64-fedora23-linux-gnu’ instead of ‘x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu’. Feel free to experiment but make sure the string ends with ‘linux’ or ‘gnu’.
If the
make
is successful, you can go head and try the build.src/emacs
Now try querying the version within Emacs.
M-x version
-
-
Install
Try out Emacs with your custom configuration. When you are happy, you can proceed toward installation.
sudo make install
Emacs binary will be inside
/opt/emacs-pretest/bin/emacs
. This is symbolic link to the file/opt/emacs-pretest/bin/emacs-25.0.92
If everything goes well, you can add this binary to your launch application or just create a desktop shortcut.
You should keep the stable version of Emacs as a backup. Till now, I never faced any problem and will continue using Emacs-pretest as my default.
If you encounter any issues during make
, make sure you have all
dependencies installed. If you think, there is an issue in the pretest
release and needs to be fixed, make sure that it is reproducible
before notifying emacs-devel@gnu.org
. You can also ask for help on
IRC at freenode, channel #emacs
.