Building and Installing Emacs on Windows NT and Windows 95 You need a compiler package to build and install Emacs on NT or Win95. If you don't have one, precompiled versions are available in ftp://ftp.cs.washington.edu/pub/ntemacs/. Configuring: (1) In previous versions, you needed to edit makefile.def to reflect the compiler package that you are using. You should no longer have to do this if you have defined the INCLUDE and LIB environment variables, as is customary for use with Windows compilers. (Unless you are using MSVCNT 1.1, in which case you will need to set MSVCNT11 to be a non-zero value at the top of makefile.def.) (2) Choose the directory into which Emacs will be installed, and edit makefile.def to define INSTALL_DIR to be this directory. (Alternatively, if you have INSTALL_DIR set as an environment variable, the build process will ignore the value in makefile.def and use the value of the environment variable instead.) Note that if it is not installed in the directory in which it is built, the ~16 MB of lisp files will be copied into the installation directory. Also, makefile.def is sometimes unpacked read-only; use > attrib -r makefile.def to make it writable. (3) You may need to edit nt/paths.h to specify some other device instead of `C:'. Building: (4) The target to compile the sources is "all", and is recursive starting one directory up. The makefiles for the NT port are in files named "makefile.nt". To get things started, type in this directory: > nmake -f makefile.nt all or use the ebuild.bat file. When the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages. The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but until then we will just live with them. NOTE: You should not have to edit src\paths.h to get Emacs to run correctly. All of the variables in src\paths.h are configured during start up using the nt\emacs.bat file (which gets installed as bin\emacs.bat -- see below). Installing: (5) Currently, Emacs requires a number of environment variables to be set for it to run correctly. A batch file, emacs.bat, is provided that sets these variables appropriately and then runs the executable (emacs.bat is generated using the definition of INSTALL_DIR in nt\makefile.def and the contents of nt\emacs.bat.in). (6) The install process will install the files necessary to run Emacs in INSTALL_DIR (which may be the directory in which it was built), and create a program manager/folder icon in a folder called GNU Emacs. From this directory, type: > nmake -f makefile.nt install or use the install.bat file. (7) Create the Emacs startup file. Under Unix, this file is .emacs; under NT and Win95, this files is _emacs. (If you would like to use a .emacs file that, for example, you share with a Unix version of Emacs, you can invoke Emacs with the -l option to specify the .emacs file that you would like to load.) Note that Emacs requires the environment variable HOME to be set in order for it to locate the _emacs file. Ideally, HOME should not be set in the emacs.bat file as it will be different for each user. (HOME could be set, for example, in the System panel of the Control Panel). (8) Either click on the icon, or run the emacs.bat file, and away you go. If you would like to resize the command window that Emacs uses, or change the font or colors, click on the program manager icon to start Emacs. Change the settings using the "-" menu in the upper left hand corner of the window, making sure to select the "Save" options in the dialog boxes as you do so. Exit Emacs and restart.