Learning GNU Emacs, Third Edition

In this chapter, we describe installing Emacs on Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows as well as some of the subtleties of running Emacs on the latter two platforms.

Emacs 21 runs on free Unix systems including Linux and BSD variants as well as on commercial Unix versions such as AIX, Solaris, SunOS,` and Ultrix. It runs on Mac OS X (currently a separate fork, but due to be folded into the main distribution starting with 21.4). It runs on Windows and even on MS-DOS. You can still get ports for Mac OS 8/9 and Amiga (to name only a few). Emacs is truly a multiplatform editor.

We cover installing Emacs on Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows. For Windows and Mac OS X, prebuilt binaries are available. You may want to build Emacs from source in order to obtain the latest version. However, we have found up-to-date binaries online for Windows and Mac OS X; you just have to scout around on the Net to find them. By the time you read this, the sources for the binaries that we cite may be out of date. Check out this book's web site for updated links in that case (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/gnu3).

A related issue is where to get Emacs. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is the official source for Emacs, but like most software organizations, official releases are few and far between. Often, building Emacs from CVS sources is the best way to get a leading-edge version. Only you can decide whether you would rather have the latest features along with some bugs or download the tried-and-true version from the FSF's site.