Emacs, my old friend, the cranky old wizard of editors! As previously discussed in The Magnificence of Org , the benefits of using the Emacs text editor are wildly numerous and forever interesting.1 Compiling it yourself is easy, and allows you to enjoy a maximally performant copy of this hacker’s fever dream on your personal hardware.

Check the previous Compiling Emacs 29 article for a far more detailed overview of the process - I’ll save you from the details here. This Mastering Emacs article has a great overview of what is new in Emacs 30. The following instructions will work on Debian and Ubuntu,2 but will be rather similar for other (useful) operating systems.

First, install the build dependencies and clone the repository:

sudo apt update
sudo apt-get build-dep emacs
sudo apt install libmagickwand-dev libmagickcore-dev libtree-sitter0
cd ~ && mkdir source && cd ~/source/
git clone -b emacs-30 git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs.git

Alternatively, switch to the latest branch and clean the build directory:

cd ~/source/emacs
sudo make uninstall
git fetch & git branch -r | grep "origin/emacs-"  # show releases
git checkout emacs-30
git clean -f -d -x
make clean

Configure the installation - use ./configure --help for alternatives:

./autogen.sh
./configure --with-native-compilation=aot \
            --with-tree-sitter \
            --with-modules \
            --with-threads \
            --with-mailutils \
            --with-tree-sitter \
            --with-imagemagick \
            --without-xaw3d \
            --with-x-toolkit=lucid

Compile and install Emacs 30 - use -jN to specify the number of cores to use:

make -j12
sudo make install

After a restart, use the following elisp to configure Tree-Sitter:

;; Add the following to your configuration:
(setq treesit-language-source-alist
  '((elixir "https://github.com/elixir-lang/tree-sitter-elixir")
    (clojure "https://github.com/sogaiu/tree-sitter-clojure")
    (bash "https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-bash")
    (cmake "https://github.com/uyha/tree-sitter-cmake")
    (c "https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-c")
    (elisp "https://github.com/Wilfred/tree-sitter-elisp")
    (html "https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-html")
    (javascript "https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-javascript" "master" "src")
    (json "https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-json")
    (make "https://github.com/alemuller/tree-sitter-make")
    (markdown "https://github.com/ikatyang/tree-sitter-markdown")
    (python "https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-python")))

;; https://robbmann.io/posts/emacs-treesit-auto/
(use-package treesit-auto
  :custom
  (treesit-auto-install 'prompt)
  :config
  (treesit-auto-add-to-auto-mode-alist 'all)
  (global-treesit-auto-mode))

Enjoy your snappy new copy of Emacs 30.1! If you are not familiar, consider dipping a toe into the Emacs Lisp manual to kickstart your Emacs journey, or read more about the benefits first. If you’re still not convinced, Emacs has a psychiatrist .

  1. “GNU Emacs, The Plaintext Computing Environment” uchicago.edu  ↩︎

  2. Ubuntu requires the addition of the deb-src source detailed here . ↩︎