Beginning

ob-ipython has become one of the most important tools in my workflow (along with Nikola, and the org-mode plugin), but earlier this week I stumbled upon emacs-jupyter and I thought maybe it'd be worth it to at least take a look. If the readme file is to be believed, it does everything ob-ipython does and more, so maybe my world would change once again. But then I ran into a little problem - trying to install it from MELPA caused emacs to crash… with no messages, nothing. So is this thing ready for the world to use yet?

Middle

Finding the Problem

I tried different things based on the errors in the emacs-jupyter's "Issues" but it turned out that this emacs-zmq bug had the answer - the emacs snapshot for Ubuntu wasn't built in a way that works with emacs-jupyter. The bug-report mentions an out of date gcc version, but I didn't confirm that.

Fixing the Problem

So, knowing that the version of emacs I was using was the problem I decided to build it myself. In the earlier days of Ubuntu this was something I did all the time, but it seems like it's been forever since I had to do this so I was a little worried that it might be a huge mess of Makefile debugging, but I found this page on the emacs wiki which made it pretty easy.

First Clone the Repository

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

Note: The --depth 1 option pulls only the most recent commit. This helps save on time, as the repository is huge.

Then Install the Dependencies

sudo apt-fast install autoconf automake libtool texinfo build-essential xorg-dev libgtk2.0-dev libjpeg-dev libncurses5-dev libdbus-1-dev libgif-dev libtiff-dev libm17n-dev libpng-dev librsvg2-dev libotf-dev libgnutls28-dev libxml2-dev

Then Build It

Note: This is how I first did it and it doesn't work the way I wanted it to so see the next section for the one that did work.

First do the autogen.

cd emacs
./autogen.sh

Then I did the configure. I wanted to install it in my user directory so I passed in a prefix for the path I wanted. This takes about a half a munite.

./configure --prefix=/home/athena/bin/emacs-jupyter/

And now to actually build it. The make bootstrap took around 15 minutes for me.

make bootstrap
make install

And finally link to it in /usr/local/bin.

sudo ln -s /home/athena/bin/emacs-jupyter/bin/emacs /usr/local/bin/emacs-jupyter

That bit about installing it in my home directory and linking it isn't necessary, but just a habit of mine, since I tend to forget how I installed things and having it set up this way makes me remember.

Fix the Other Problem

It turned out that the build went okay, and I could even install emacs-jupyter (yay), but when I tried to execute M-x jupyter-run-repl I got an error message saying that modules weren't supported (what?). So then I found this blog post that said you have to pass in the --with-modules argument when you run configure… So now the process became this:

cd emacs
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/home/athena/bin/emacs-jupyter/ --with-modules
make bootstrap
make install
sudo ln -s /home/athena/bin/emacs-jupyter/bin/emacs /usr/local/bin/emacs-jupyter

And what do you know, it worked.

An Update That Broke It

At some point after I first wrote this I switched to using the emacs-snapshot package, which worked for a while, but when I updated it on March 9, 2021, it caused emacs-jupyter to fail with a ZMQ error:

error in process filter: Error in ZMQ subprocess: error, ("Lisp nesting exceeds ‘max-lisp-eval-depth’")

I tried re-installing emacs-jupyter and emacs-zmq but that didn't help so I decided to find a version of emacs that was older, but they only had the most recent emacs-snapshot available for Ubuntu 20.10 so I decide to go back to building emacs myself.

Since it was an update that caused it to break (which happened sometime between August of last year when the previous snapshot came out and March 9, when I updated) pulling just the most recent version wouldn't work for me, given that I needed to find code that predated the thing that broke it, so I pulled the whole history and the found the tag for the most recent release (emacs-27.1-rc2) from last August and checked it out.

git checkout emacs-27.1-rc2

According to Stack Overflow you could also just checkout that one tag, but I didn't think to look until after I already cloned it. Also, I don't know how I would have gotten the tag without cloning it first. Must be out there somewhere.

And then built it like I did in the previous section.

Also, since I pulled an older version I had to re-compile the packages as mentioned on Stack Overflow. First M-: then in the mini-buffer

(byte-recompile-directory package-user-dir nil 'force)

End

emacs-jupyter looks like an improvement over ob-ipython in that it adds a lot of features (and claims to be faster), but getting it to work was way harder than I'm used to. I don't think it was "difficult" in a real sense, given what it used to be like to make and install things on Ubuntu, but I think I've gotten used to things just working. Anyway, now I can see if emacs-jupyter lives up to its own hype.

Update: Since I first wrote this I've come to rely on emacs-jupyter a lot, I don't take advantage of a lot of its features, but for executing python code in org-babel, it's everything that I need (so far).

Table of Contents