Building Emacs on macOS Sierra

Important update -> here.

It’s been quite a while since we built Emacs from source on the Mac, but 25.1 has been official release, not to mention macOS (really?) Sierra to muddy the waters, so let’s take it for another spin. As usual, you need Xcode (free in the Mac App Store) to build. But, you already have that, right?

You also need Autoconf and Automake. The simple approach is to get them from Homebrew:

brew install autoconf automake

But you can also build them from source:

Autoconf:

cd /tmp
curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-latest.tar.gz
tar xf autoconf-latest.tar.gz
cd autoconf-*/
./configure
make
sudo make install

Automake:

cd /tmp
curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.15.tar.gz
tar xf automake-1.15.tar.gz
cd automake-1.15
./configure
make
sudo make install

Next grab the source:

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

And checkout the emacs-25 branch (master is the development branch):

git checkout emacs-25

Time to build:

make configure
./configure --with-ns
make install

And don’t panic, make install build the application bundle, it doesn’t actually install anything. When make finishes, the app will have build as nextstep/Emacs.app. To take it for a test drive:

open nextstep/Emacs.app

If it looks good, you can install it by revealing it in the Finder:

open -R nextstep/Emacs.app

and dragging Emacs to the Applications folder.

25.1 is definitely a refinement release, there’s a long, long list of changes in the News file. Perhaps something will catch your eye (I like the new giant visual bell warning icon.)

And boom, you’re up to date. I’ve built and used this version on both macOS [sic] Sierra and OS X El Capitan without issue.

See ya next release…