Install Emacs 24 in Ubuntu

2011-11-30 by 13 Comments

[2012-07-19] Update: Please see Damien Cassou’s comment describing his emacs snapshot PPA moving forward.

After reading several good things about emacs 24, I decided to give it a shot. A little googling led me to Damien Cassou’s emacs snapshot PPA. Simply ran the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cassou/emacs
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot
emacs-snapshot

Everything works great so far, specifically email in mew, chatting with jabber.el, my org files, and org2blog/wp. Played with the built-in ELPA package manager a little, and I really thing it will be nice to avoid manual package management.

Haven’t decided if/how often I’ll update my snapshot. Maybe until emacs 24 comes out in the Canonical packages? But then will I want to stay on the bleeding edge? Thoughts/suggestions/experiences?

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: ,

Comments

  1. Hoang Tran says:
    2011-12-05 at 01:18

    It works for me. Thanks!

    Reply
  2. Boris Rusev says:
    2012-01-21 at 05:55

    Thank you very much sir, it worked perfectly for me :)

    Reply
  3. Dave says:
    2012-03-29 at 18:00

    In Kubuntu 12.04 I’m getting this error when I call emacs via emacs-snapshot from the command line.

    LIBDBUSMENU-GTK-CRITICAL **: watch_submenu: assertion `GTK_IS_MENU_SHELL(menu)’ failed

    Reply
  4. Mikey Boldt says:
    2012-04-17 at 16:38

    @Dave: Without knowing anything else, per a couple launchpad bugs 1 2 that message is “overly loud” and might not be the true cause of the problem. I do see messages like:

    Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to load type module: (null)
    undefined symbol: menu_proxy_module_load

    but emacs seems to run fine for me.

    Reply
  5. Jason John Wells says:
    2012-04-28 at 00:58

    Thank you very mush sir. I am excited about running Emacs 24 in Ubuntu 12.04. Unity is much improved and it is so snappy with only 2 GB RAM in Virtualbox.

    Reply
  6. CV Radhakrishnan says:
    2012-05-31 at 10:35

    I just installed Ubuntu 12.04 and Emacs 24. Both work fine.

    Reply
  7. Damien Cassou says:
    2012-07-19 at 09:51

    My PPA now has both emacs24 and emacs-snapshot:

    - emacs24 will be updated only when I change the build process or when new emacs24 are realeased

    - emacs-snapshot are updated between once a week or once every two weeks on average.

    Enjoy

    Reply
  8. mojo706 says:
    2012-08-27 at 04:56

    Thanks it works fine any tutorials or tips?

    Reply
  9. Andrew Pennebaker says:
    2013-03-09 at 12:48

    I added the ppa and ran “apt-get update”.

    apt-get can’t find “emacs24″, but it can find “emacs-snapshot”.

    Reply
    • Mikey Boldt says:
      2013-03-10 at 17:20

      You could try the instructions at the PPA page for getting a clean install:

      $ sudo apt-get update
      $ sudo apt-get install
      $ sudo apt-get purge emacs-snapshot-common emacs-snapshot-bin-common emacs-snapshot emacs-snapshot-el emacs-snapshot-gtk emacs23 emacs23-bin-common emacs23-common emacs23-el emacs23-nox emacs23-lucid auctex emacs24 emacs24-bin-common emacs24-common emacs24-common-non-dfsg

      Reply
  10. Samuel M says:
    2013-04-13 at 21:16

    I managed to install it (GNU Emacs 24.3.50.1) and it works fine except the emacsclient won’t lock to the Ubuntu unity launcher. Whenever I reopen a new script or program file with emacs, another emacs client or “thumb-nail” appears on the unity bar.

    Is anyone else having this problem?

    Reply