Compiling Emacs 27 on macOS

Since the Brew project have started removing options on their core formulae — for reasons I am unsure of — I decided to clone the latest Emacs source and attempt to build from scratch on OSX in order to keep on using the Cocoa build and enabling ImageMagick for PDF-reading purposes, and also why not.

This post is just a self-memo to remember how I compiled it. As I'm writing this I realise it's completely useless as Emacs has the handy system-configuration-options variable built-in which describes exactly how you compiled it. Anyway, for reference to other Emacsen:

This was done on my work computer, a MacBook Pro running macOS High Sierra version 10.13.6.

1. Clone Emacs from the official repo or the github mirror;
2. This is my configure:

./configure \
  --with-ns \
  --without-dbus \
  --with-imagemagick \
  --disable-ns-self-contained

A quick walk through the options:

without-dbus

DBus isn't shipped on macOS AFAIK;

with-ns

with NextStep (ns) is our build-for-Mac ticket: I'm not sure what it does apart from using the proper windowing system but you probably can't build without either;

with-imagemagick

compile with ImageMagick (7) support, I think;

disable-ns-self-contained

if this is omitted, Emacs is bundled in a big .app file that you can run like any normal macOS application. I don't want this as I like to run an Emacs server then have instances of emacsclient connecting to it on the fly. Maybe there's a way to get the best of both world but I couldn't figure out how.

EDIT: I just had a look through the ./configure --help and --with-ns is automatically infered on OSX. This in turns enables the correct subset of options for our platform, so a lot of my initial options (--without-gsettings and others) are automatically set. You can probably get away with ./configure and that's it… Oh well.

If the previous succeeds, move on to the usual stuff:

make && make install

I didn't need sudo for the install step.

Enjoy the freshest Emacs!

No major ones so far; I have some trouble with a weird entry in my load-history variable (some (require . info) regexp-matching strangery) but I think that might just be my own.

Don't hesitate to write if you can complement that article in any way. I hope it's useful.