I have installed the latest development version of Emacs on my Mac from the source by cloning the Git repository here ('Emacs source repository' under 'Anonymous clone'), and then executing make
in the repo's top directory.
It didn't go smoothly, but only because I didn't have some prerequisites installed (namely, Autoconf
and gnutls
, and the OS X command-line tools). Once I'd installed the prerequisites (Autoconf
and gnutls
with Homebrew, and the OS X command-line tools by running xcode-select --install
), the make
script completed successfully.
However, when I open the Emacs GUI (<installation directory>/nextstep/Emacs
), there's no splash screen, and instead of the usual *GNU Emacs* buffer, the *scratch* buffer opens initially.
More importantly, when I try to inspect variables by executing C-h v
, the following error message appears in the echo buffer:
Cannot open load file: No such file or directory, help-fns
Why doesn't the C-h v
command work, and how can I view and set a variable's value as well as inspect the info about a variable?
I run macOS Sierra version 10.12.5 (the latest release as of today).
(mapconcat 'identity load-path "\n")
and post the output here? This should show where Emacs will look for Emacs Lisp source files. – wvxvw Jul 18 '17 at 12:31find /Users/evanaad/Documents/emacs/nextstep/Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/lisp -exec grep 'help-fns' {} +
does this find any results? Hopefully, something like(provide 'help-fns)
. – wvxvw Jul 18 '17 at 12:58make
isn't enough, you also needmake install
. Did you also do that? – wvxvw Jul 18 '17 at 13:00find /Users/evanaad/Documents/emacs/nextstep/Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/lisp
yieldsNo such file or directory
. 2. No, I did not runmake install
. I'll run it now and try again. – Evan Aad Jul 18 '17 at 13:05