Build Emacs On Windows
On Windows, we can build GNU Emacs with MSYS2 and MinGW-w64.
First, install some necessary packages. The packages include the base developer tools, the compiler toolchain, several image libraries, and XML library, the GnuTLS library, zlib for decompressing text, HarfBuzz for use as the shaping engine, libgccjit for native-compilation support, SQLite3 for accessing SQL databases, and the tree-sitter library used by some major modes. You can select only part of the libraries if you don't need them all.
pacman --noconfirm -S --needed \ base-devel \ mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain \ mingw-w64-x86_64-xpm-nox \ mingw-w64-x86_64-gmp \ mingw-w64-x86_64-gnutls \ mingw-w64-x86_64-libtiff \ mingw-w64-x86_64-giflib \ mingw-w64-x86_64-libpng \ mingw-w64-x86_64-libjpeg-turbo \ mingw-w64-x86_64-librsvg \ mingw-w64-x86_64-libwebp \ mingw-w64-x86_64-lcms2 \ mingw-w64-x86_64-jansson \ mingw-w64-x86_64-libxml2 \ mingw-w64-x86_64-zlib \ mingw-w64-x86_64-harfbuzz \ mingw-w64-x86_64-libgccjit \ mingw-w64-x86_64-sqlite3 \ mingw-w64-x86_64-tree-sitter
Then, use git to clone the repository, we also need autotools to generate the configure script.
pacman --noconfirm -S git autotools git config --global core.autocrlf false
You now have a complete build environment for Emacs.
mkdir /c/emacs cd /c/emacs git clone --depth=1 https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/emacs.git emacs-master cd /c/emacs/emacs-master ./autogen.sh ./configure --prefix=/c/programs/emacs --without-dbus --without-native-compilation NPROC=$(nproc) make -j${NPROC} make install
After building and installing, we need to copy necessary DLLs into Emacs's bin directory if we run Emacs outside the mingw64 shell.
cp -v /mingw64/bin/libbrotlicommon.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libbrotlidec.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libbz*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libcairo-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libcairo-gobject-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libdatrie-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libdeflate.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libexpat-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libffi-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libfontconfig-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libfreetype-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libfribidi-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libgcc_s_seh-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libgdk_pixbuf-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libgif-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libgio-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libglib-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libgmodule-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libgmp-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libgnutls-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libgobject-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libgraphite*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libharfbuzz-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libhogweed-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libiconv-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libidn*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libintl-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libjansson-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libjbig-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libjpeg-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/liblcms*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libLerc.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/liblzma-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libnettle-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libp11-kit-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libpango-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libpangocairo-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libpangoft*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libpangowin32-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libpcre*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libpixman-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libpng*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/librsvg*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libsqlite*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libstdc++-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libtasn1-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libthai-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libtiff-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libtree-sitter.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libunistring-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libwebp-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libwebpdemux-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libwinpthread-*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libxml*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libXpm*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/libzstd.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin cp -v /mingw64/bin/zlib*.dll /c/programs/emacs/bin