GNU Emacs

Resources

GNU Emacs is Article description::a powerful, extensible, self-documenting text editor. It is released by the Free Software Foundation and has been under development since 1976. In Gentoo, GNU Emacs is maintained by the team of the same name, which can be reached through gnu-emacs@gentoo.org. Detailed developer information can be found on the project page.

Installation

USE flags

USE flags for app-editors/emacs The extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor

`Xaw3d`	Add support for the 3d athena widget set
`acl`	Add support for Access Control Lists
`alsa`	Add support for media-libs/alsa-lib (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture)
`aqua`	Include support for the Mac OS X Aqua (Carbon/Cocoa) GUI
`athena`	Enable the MIT Athena widget set (x11-libs/libXaw)
`cairo`	Enable support for the cairo graphics library
`dbus`	Enable dbus support for anything that needs it (gpsd, gnomemeeting, etc)
`dynamic-loading`	Enable loading of dynamic libraries (modules) at runtime
`games`	Support shared score files for games
`gconf`	Use gnome-base/gconf to read the system font name
`gfile`	Use gfile (dev-libs/glib) for file notification
`gif`	Add GIF image support
`gmp`	Use the GNU multiple precision arithmetic library (dev-libs/gmp) instead of the bundled mini-gmp subset
`gpm`	Add support for sys-libs/gpm (Console-based mouse driver)
`gsettings`	Use gsettings (dev-libs/glib) to read the system font name
`gtk`	Add support for x11-libs/gtk+ (The GIMP Toolkit)
`gui`	Enable support for a graphical user interface
`gzip-el`	Compress bundled Emacs Lisp source
`harfbuzz`	Use media-libs/harfbuzz as text shaping engine
`imagemagick`	Use media-gfx/imagemagick for image processing
`inotify`	Enable inotify filesystem monitoring support
`jpeg`	Add JPEG image support
`json`	Compile with native JSON support using dev-libs/jansson
`kerberos`	Add kerberos support
`lcms`	Add lcms support (color management engine)
`libxml2`	Use dev-libs/libxml2 to parse XML instead of the internal Lisp implementations
`livecd`	!!internal use only!! DO NOT SET THIS FLAG YOURSELF!, used during livecd building
`m17n-lib`	Enable m17n-lib support
`mailutils`	Retrieve e-mail using net-mail/mailutils instead of the internal movemail substitute
`png`	Add support for libpng (PNG images)
`selinux`	!!internal use only!! Security Enhanced Linux support, this must be set by the selinux profile or breakage will occur
`sound`	Enable sound support
`source`	Install C source files and make them available for find-function
`ssl`	Add support for SSL/TLS connections (Secure Socket Layer / Transport Layer Security)
`svg`	Add support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
`systemd`	Enable use of systemd-specific libraries and features like socket activation or session tracking
`threads`	Add elisp threading support
`tiff`	Add support for the TIFF image format
`toolkit-scroll-bars`	Use the selected toolkit's scrollbars in preference to Emacs' own scrollbars
`wide-int`	Prefer wide Emacs integers (typically 62-bit). This option has an effect only on architectures where "long" and "long long" types have different size.
`xft`	Build with support for XFT font renderer (x11-libs/libXft)
`xpm`	Add support for XPM graphics format
`xwidgets`	Enable use of GTK widgets in Emacs buffers (requires GTK3)
`zlib`	Add support for zlib (de)compression

Data provided by the Gentoo Package Database · Last update: 2021-03-18 16:33 More information about USE flags

Note
USE flags for toolkits gtk, motif, athena, and aqua are mutually exclusive. Generally, USE="gtk" is a good choice. However, if intending to use Emacs as a daemon, USE="motif -athena -gtk -Xaw3d" or USE="athena Xaw3d -gtk -motif" is recommended instead because of bug #292471. USE="athena Xaw3d" resembles USE="gtk" very well. USE="aqua" is a special case applying only to Mac OS X.

Emerge

root #emerge --ask app-editors/emacs

Several versions side-by-side

In Gentoo, several Emacs versions can be installed on a system simultaneously. The upstream version already installs elisp and data files into versioned subdirectories. To avoid file collisions between slots, in Gentoo binaries and man pages are suffixed with their corresponding version number, too.

The eselect module from app-eselect/eselect-emacs can be used to link /usr/bin/emacs and its auxiliary programs to the ones belonging to the desired Emacs version. Consult the eselect user guide for details on eselect.

Configuration

Emacs can be customized by clicking through the GUI (use M-x customize-group RET) or by using the ~/.emacs configuration file which is written in Emacs Lisp, Emacs' own Lisp dialect.

Documentation

For a quick-start documentation, type in Emacs: C-h t (Ctrl+h followed by t). For further help on how to use Emacs, start emacs and type C-h r (Ctrl+h followed by r). To exit Emacs, type C-x C-c (Ctrl+x followed by Ctrl+c).

Additional elisp packages

Emacs has lots of additional packages written in elisp. There is a number of ways to install them, but the standard one is package.el nowadays. On Gentoo it can be used both on per-user and system-wide way.

To install elisp packages per-user use package.el distributed with GNU Emacs.

To install elisp packages system-wide under the Portage control you can use gs-elpa. Read layman documentation before using it, as gs-elpa represents ELPA repositories as layman overlays. It currently supports 4 repositories: gnu-elpa, marmalade, melpa and melpa-stable.

When the layman setup works, install gs-elpa:

root #emerge --ask app-portage/gs-elpa

After it you can start adding elisp repos and emerging packages, e.g.:

root #layman -L

root #layman -a gnu-elpa

root #layman -a melpa-stable

root #

emerge --ask app-emacs/starter-kit app-emacs/starter-kit-bindings app-emacs/starter-kit-eshell app-emacs/starter-kit-lisp

Warning
Always add gnu-elpa repository first, as other repos depend on it.

Bugs related to gs-elpa should be reported on its issue tracker.

If you ever find bugs like this one, you can exclude packages from dependencies adding their name to the "external" object in the "common-config" section of /etc/g-sorcery/gs-elpa.json configuration file. For the example issue it would be (together with already added packages):

FILE /etc/g-sorcery/gs-elpa.json

"external": {"emacs": "virtual/emacs", "cl-lib": "virtual/emacs", "eieio": "virtual/emacs"}