Emacs Builds

Self-contained Emacs.app builds for macOS, with native-compilation support.

Features

• Self-contained Emacs.app application bundle, with no external dependencies.
• Native compilation (gccemacs).
• Native JSON parsing.
• SVG rendering via librsvg.
• Various image formats are supported via macOS native image APIs.
• Xwidget-webkit support, allowing access to a embedded WebKit-based browser with M-x xwidget-webkit-browse-url.
• Native XML parsing via libxml2.
• Dynamic module loading.
• Includes the fix-window-role, system-appearance, and round-undecorated-frame patches from the excellent emacs-plus project.
• Emacs source is fetched from the emacs-mirror/emacs GitHub repository.
• Build creation is transparent and public through the use of GitHub Actions, allowing anyone to inspect git commit SHAs, full source code, and exact commands used to produce a build.
• Emacs.app is signed with a developer certificate and notarized by Apple.
• Uses build-emacs-for-macos to build the self-contained application bundle.

System Requirements

• Builds produced after 2024-11-30:
  • macOS 11 or later.
• Builds produced before 2024-11-30:
  • macOS 13 Ventura or later for Apple Silicon builds.
  • macOS 12 Monterey or later for Intel builds.
• Xcode Command Line Tools to use native compilation in Emacs, available since Emacs 28.x builds.

Installation

Manual Download

See the Releases page to download latest builds, or here for the latest stable release.

Nightly builds of Emacs are for the most part just fine, but if you don't like living too close to the edge, see issue #7 Known Good Nightly Builds for a list of recent nightly builds which have been actively used by a living being for at least a day or two without any obvious issues.

Homebrew Cask

1. Install the jimeh/emacs-builds Homebrew tap:

   brew tap jimeh/emacs-builds
   

2. Install one of the available casks:
   • emacs-app — Latest stable release of Emacs.

     brew install --cask emacs-app
     

   • emacs-app-pretest — Latest pretest build of Emacs.

     brew install --cask emacs-app-pretest
     

   • emacs-app-nightly — Build of Emacs from the master branch, updated every night.

     brew install --cask emacs-app-nightly
     

   • emacs-app-monthly — Build of Emacs from the master branch, updated on the 1st of each month. These includes native Apple Silicon support.

     brew install --cask emacs-app-monthly
     

   • emacs-app-good for the latest known good nightly build listed on #7:

     brew install --cask emacs-app-good
     

Apple Silicon

As of 2024-11-30, all builds include both Apple Silicon (arm64) and Intel (x86_64) artifacts.

Use Emacs.app as emacs CLI Tool

Installed via Homebrew Cask

The cask installation method sets up CLI usage automatically by exposing a emacs command. However it will launch Emacs into GUI mode. To instead have emacs in your terminal open a terminal instance of Emacs, add the following alias to your shell setup:

alias emacs="emacs -nw"

Installed Manually

Builds come with a custom emacs shell script launcher for use from the command line, located next to emacsclient in Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin.

The custom emacs script makes sure to use the main Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs executable from the correct path, ensuring it finds all the relevant dependencies within the Emacs.app bundle, regardless of if it's exposed via PATH or symlinked from elsewhere.

To use it, simply add Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin to your PATH. For example, if you place Emacs.app in /Applications:

if [ -d "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin" ]; then
  export PATH="/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin:$PATH"
  alias emacs="emacs -nw" # Always launch "emacs" in terminal mode.
fi

If you want emacs in your terminal to launch a GUI instance of Emacs, don't use the alias from the above example.

Build Process

Building Emacs is done using the jimeh/build-emacs-for-macos build script, executed within a GitHub Actions workflow.

Full history for all builds is available on GitHub Actions here. Build logs are only retained by GitHub for 90 days though.

Nightly builds are scheduled for 23:00 UTC every night, based on the latest commit from the master branch of the emacs-mirror/emacs repository. This means a nightly build will only be produced if there have been new commits since the last nightly build.

Application Signing / Trust

As of June 21st, 2021, all builds are fully signed and notarized. The signing certificate used is: Developer ID Application: Jim Myhrberg (5HX66GF82Z)

To verify the application signature and notarization, you can use spctl:

$ spctl -vvv --assess --type exec /Applications/Emacs.app
/Applications/Emacs.app: accepted
source=Notarized Developer ID
origin=Developer ID Application: Jim Myhrberg (5HX66GF82Z)

All builds also come with a SHA256 checksum file, which itself can be double checked against the SHA256 checksum log output from the packaging step of the GitHub Actions workflow run which produced the build.

Issues / To-Do

Please see Issues for details of things to come, or to report issues.

News / Recent Changes

2024-12-01 — Apple Silicon builds all the time, more stability via Nix

GitHub's standard runner for macOS 14 and later runs on Apple Silicon, and are free to use for public repositories. As such we now use runs-on: macos-13 for Intel builds, and runs-on: macos-14 for Apple Silicon builds. And we do so on all builds, nightlies, pretests, and stable.

Additionally, macOS 11 Big Sur is now the minimum required version again, for both Intel and Apple Silicon builds. This is due to switching from Homebrew to Nix for managing build-time dependencies. And it supports easily switching between different macOS SDK versions, meaning we can target an SDK that is older than the OS we are creating the builds on.

2023-11-22 — Apple Silicon builds, drop macOS 11 support

Apple Silicon builds are now available, but limited to stable releases, and nightly builds on the 1st of each month due to the cost of using M1-based runners on GitHub Actions. Apple Silicon builds also require macOS 13 Ventura, as that is the oldest macOS version available on M1-based runners.

Additionally, Intel builds minimum required macOS version has been increased from macOS 11 Big Sur, to macOS 12 Monterey. This was needed as Homebrew no longer supports Big Sur, leading to very lengthy and error prone builds as all Homebrew dependencies had to be installed from source.

If dropping support for macOS 11 turns out to be a big issue, it may be possible to offer macOS 11 compatible builds on a less frequent schedule similar to what we're doing with Apple Silicon.