You are probably wondering what all the fuss is about the newest prerelease versions of Emacs 24. Well, the best way to see them is to install the newest version.Here’s how you can do that on Debian.

This tutorial is based upon this official (more expert friendly) tutorial. If you want some challenge you can just try to install from there without reading the rest of this blog post. First you must install git if you don’t have git:

sudo apt-get install git

This will allow you to pull the newest release from the repository. Using this command:

git clone --depth 1 git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs.git

Wait for your computer to download all of the files it might take a while. Now you need to install a  bunch of dependencies. You can try compiling without them and see which ones you absolutely need. But you at least need:

• build-essential
• xorg-dev
• libgtk2.0-dev

All of these can be installed through “sudo apt-get install “.  Now you must compile the source by running “cd ~/emacs” then:

./autogen.sh
./configure
make bootstrap (this will take a while)
sudo make install

This should leave you with a working Emacs 24 install. It might take a long time but it is totally worth it

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