Emacs AppImage

AppImage is a single-file executable format for linux. This repo builds Emacs as AppImages for x86-64 linux systems.

Highlights

  • Supports native-comp, native json, tree sitter
  • Self-contained, no extra dependencies
  • Automatically built on Github Actions
  • Provides both latest release and daily master builds

Download

  • Release (latest version 29.4)
  • Daily master build
  • NEW! Daily mps build: the experimental MPS GC feature from scratch/igc branch. This version does not supports pgtk yet.

Version string meanings

  • x11: built with X11 GUI support
  • pgtk: built with PGTK GUI support, for wayland desktop
  • nox: built without GUI support

How-to

  1. Download *.AppImage
  2. chmod +x Emacs.AppImage
  3. ./Emacs.AppImage

The appimage executable accepts the same arguments as emacs itself.

Furthermore, if you want to run any other binaries shipped with emacs (e.g. emacsclient, etags), add --emacs-appimage-run-as BINARY_NAME as the first arguments, aka: ./Emacs.AppImage --emacs-appimage-run-as emacsclient xxx yyy.

Prerequisite

  • A not-too-old linux system (at least ~ ubuntu 18.04, which is the system it's built on)
  • FUSE 2.x, which should be pre-installed in most distributions.
    • Recent distributions (e.g. ubuntu 22.04+) may have FUSE 3.x installed instead, you need to also install the 2.x version.
    • For more help, see here

Tested in:

  • Ubuntu 20.04
  • Fedora 39