Compiling Emacs from Source on MacOS Big Sur

Published: 2021-11-09

Recently I started to compile the Emacs master branch from source for daily use instead of using one of the popular formulas on Homebrew.¹ It’s pretty cool to try the latest features like the native compilation and the native emoji before the stable releases. Also it’s quite a satisfying experience to be able to compile Emacs from source. It took me several tries to get it right but I think I documented everything. Here are the steps:

Install dependencies

• libxml2
• Optional for native compilation
  • gcc
  • libgccjit

brew install libxml2 gcc libgccjit

Follow the post-installation instruction from libxml2 to fix the path and environment variables.

If you need to have libxml2 first in your PATH, run:
  echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/libxml2/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc

For compilers to find libxml2 you may need to set:
  export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/libxml2/lib"
  export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/libxml2/include"

For pkg-config to find libxml2 you may need to set:
  export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/opt/libxml2/lib/pkgconfig"

Compile

I configured my Emacs with the following options. I’m not exactly sure what each meant but this combination seems to work on my machine:

• --with-cairo - enable Cairo drawing
• --with-imagemagick - enable ImageMagick support
• --with-xwidgets
• --with-native-compilation - enable native compilation

./autogen.sh
./configure --with-cairo --with-imagemagick --with-xwidgets --with-native-compilation
# Build MacOS App bundle, `install` doesn’t actually install anything.
make clean install

The Emacs.app App bundle should now be in the nextstep/ directory. Simply copy it to the /Applications folder to use it.

References

• Building Emacs 27.1 on macOS Big Sur
• Compiling Emacs in the absence of a configurable brew version

Footnotes