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 The bug-report mentions an out of date gcc version, but I didn't confirm that.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

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

cd emacs
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/home/athena/bin/emacs-jupyter/
make bootstrap
make install
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 I didn't want to let the Makefile clobber anything (and I was too lazy to read it too closely).

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.

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.

Table of Contents