Question

I’ve been using Emacs for quite some time for basic text editing but as of today I am attempting to use it for c++ compilation. I have looked for the past few hours about how to go about this but I keep hitting roadblocks in their techniques (I think some of this is having to do with the tutorials being outdated).

Basically, all I want to do is be able to compile C++ programs that I write in Emacs through the ‘M-x compile’ command.

So far I have installed Cygwin and downloaded the packages for gcc. I have attempted some other solutions presented by tutorials online but they didn’t pan out.

Thank you.

Answer 1

The M-x compile command calls out to a shell (e.g. linux bash, windows cmd.exe, etc) to run the make command. On windows I think emacs defaults to the cmd.exe shell (through a special C:/Program Files/Emacs/emacs/bin/cmdproxy.exe executable).

If you want your M-x compile to use a different shell (probably cygwin bash in your case) then you need to tell emacs through changing shell-file-name variable or using the SHELL environment variable. You will also need to make sure that the cygwin make is found by changing exec-path variable (or using PATH environment variable).

To do this:

(setq shell-file-name 'C:/cygwin/bin/bash.exe')  (setq exec-path (cons 'C:/cygwin/bin' exec-path)) 

And you could also look at setup-cygwin.el to set this up and some other things for cygwin.