Emacs install I use emacs as my editor of choice, I can use others, but if I have to choose, then I choose emacs, it has always been a powerful choice that grew with the years, every time I look at it again I discover new things. I have a debian jessie (8.1) VM where I wanted to have the latest emacs, so I compiled it: Install dependencies: sudo aptitude update sudo aptitude install autoconf automake libtool texinfo build-essential xorg-dev libgtk2.