This page is now frozen. See http://web.psung.name/emacs/setup.html for the latest version of this information.
There are two major varieties of Emacs in use today, GNU Emacs and XEmacs. I use GNU Emacs.
GNU Emacs 22, recently released (2 June 2007), provides many cool new features. If your distribution has not yet packaged that release, you may be able to get packages containing snapshots of Emacs CVS preceding the release.
Here are instructions for some GNU/Linux distributions:
| Distribution | GNU Emacs 22 Snapshot | GNU Emacs 21 |
| Debian (Stable) | N/A1 | apt-get install emacs21 |
| Debian (Unstable) | apt-get install emacs22 or apt-get install emacs22-gtk 2 |
apt-get install emacs21 |
| Ubuntu 7.04 or 7.103 | apt-get install emacs22 or apt-get install emacs22-gtk 2 |
apt-get install emacs21 |
| Gentoo | emerge =app-editors/emacs-22* | emerge emacs |
| Fedora or Red Hat | N/A?4 | yum install emacs |
1 Debian Stable users can download packaged snapshots from http://emacs.orebokech.com/.
2 The GTK version goes well with GTK-based desktop environments such as GNOME and XFCE.
3 On Ubuntu, you'll need to enable the universe component. On Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), you'll also need to enable the feisty-backports repository.
4 I've heard that Fedora 7 will ship with Emacs 22.
Then invoke Emacs:
$ emacs
GNU provides precompiled Emacs binaries for Windows. Download either the package labeled bin or fullbin. (I suggest fullbin, which includes the elisp source files— you never know when they might come in handy.) Then read the installation instructions. For more information, read the Windows FAQ.
EmacsW32 is a set of patches for GNU Emacs which changes its behavior in some ways to make it integrate better with Windows. EmacsW32 ships with an installer which will help you install both GNU Emacs (version 22) as well as EmacsW32 itself.
Emacs is also packaged for setup and use within Cygwin, if you are using that.
Mac OS X ships with GNU Emacs 21. Run it by typing emacs in a terminal.
Aquamacs is an Emacs variant which is based on GNU Emacs and changes the look-and-feel, keymap, and some features to make it more consistent with other Mac applications.