Installing Emacs Lisp locally

Since Emacs Lisp (elisp) is the extension language for Emacs, you'll need to install GNU Emacs first.

It is recommended to get the latest Emacs, but 28.1 or higher should be considered the target implementation for the exercises. If you already have Emacs installed you can check the Emacs version via M-x emacs-version RET.

On OS X

The easiest way is to visit Emacs For Mac OS X and download the dmg, which will install GNU Emacs as a packaged OS X app.

Alternatives exist, such as Aquamacs (not recommended) or installing via Homebrew, if you prefer.

On Linux

On some distros, Emacs is already installed, since it's part of GNU.

Ubuntu

The currently recommended way to install the most recent Emacs is via snap:

sudo snap install emacs --classic

If you don't want to use snap you can also install Emacs via snap, but the version available from the Ubuntu repositories is often out of date. If you want to install a more recent version of Emacs via apt you'll need to use a PPA or build from source.

If you don't care about installing the latest version, it should be as simple as

sudo apt-get install emacs

Arch

Arch usually ships with the latest Emacs version, so run:

sudo pacman -S emacs

and you should be set.

Other distros

Check with your distro to see what version is current, and use your package manager or build from source as appropriate.

Windows

To install Emacs on Windows head over to the nearest FTP archive mirror, grab the installer (=emacs-XX.X-installer.exe=), and launch it. If you don't want use Emacs without installing it you can grab the file with the pattern =emacs-XX.x.zip=, unpack it and launch bin\runemacs.exe.

If you are using MSYS2 you can install the 64bits build of Emacs with

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-emacs

or the 32bits build with

pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-emacs