Guides:Emacs Installation Guide

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GNU Emacs is packaged in many Linux distributions and can be installed from Canonical's Snap or built yourself if not present in your distribution. This guide will provide information on how to install Emacs in these cases. Emacs 28.1 and above is reccomended for daily use.

Installing

Debian/Ubuntu-based distros

# Installing Emacs GTK (X11)
$ sudo apt install emacs-gtk

# Installing Emacs PGTK (Wayland)
$ sudo apt install emacs-pgtk

Fedora-based distros

# Installing Emacs GTK (X11)
$ sudo dnf install emacs-gtk+x11

# Installing Emacs PGTK (Wayland)
$ sudo dnf install emacs

openSUSE Tumbleweed

# Installing Emacs GTK (X11)
$ sudo zypper in emacs-gtk

# Installing Emacs PGTK (Wayland)
# openSUSE does not provide a package for Emacs PGTK.
# Check the "Installing From Source" section for installation steps.

Arch Linux

# Installing Emacs GTK (X11)
$ sudo pacman -S emacs

# Installing Emacs PGTK (Wayland)
$ sudo pacman -S emacs-wayland

Gentoo Linux

The installation process for Emacs is different on Gentoo Linux, as it uses USE flags instead of different package names to specify how it was built.

Add the correpsonding options to /etc/portage/package.use/emacs:

# Emacs GTK (X11)
app-editors/emacs       X gtk

# Emacs PGTK (Wayland)
app-editors/emacs       -X gtk

After adding this, you can then run $ sudo emerge --ask app-editors/emacs.

Installing from Source

Emacs provides information on how to install itself from source in root/INSTALL its Savannah repository.