Compiling Emacs 27.0.91 on Ubuntu 18.04

Notes on how I compiled and installed Emacs 27.0.91 in a custom directory on my system running Ubuntu 18.04. Before this I was using Emacs 27.0.90, which I wrote about earlier.

My plan was to stay with 27.0.90 until 27.1 was released, but then I found out that JSON parsing is ~15 times faster when Emacs uses native JSON support. This is a big deal for me since I’m using lsp-mode, a client/library for the Language Server Protocol (LSP), and LSP is JSON-based.

Since I wanted to compile Emacs to get native json support anyway, I thought I might as well use the latest release, i.e. 27.0.91.

Instructions if you want to follow along:

  • Download emacs-27.0.91.tar.xz and unpack with tar -xf emacs-27.0.91.tar.xz.
  • Install the JSON-library Emacs wants: sudo apt install libjansson-dev
  • Run the configure and make commands below.
./configure --prefix=/home/thomas/prg/emacs-27.0.91 --disable-silent-rules \
--with-modules --with-file-notification=inotify --with-mailutils \
--with-x=yes --with-x-toolkit=gtk3 --with-xwidgets --with-lcms2 \
--with-imagemagick --with-json
make bootstrap
make install

The configure command is essentially the same as last time, except this time I added --with-json (and changed the prefix parameter).