nethack-el

What happens when you combine the most advanced, self-documenting, customizable, extensible real-time display editor, Emacs, with nethack, the most elaborate role-playing environment ever invented?

You get the most advanced, elaborate, self-documenting, customizable, extensible, role-playing environment in the world!

All of the Elisp is GPLv3-or-later, and the patches are under the modified 3-clause BSD.

Features

• Customizable keys
• Customizable colors
• Macros
• Event hooks
• All the beauty that comes with Emacs

Project Status

I am semi-actively adding new features and fixing bugs as of August 2025. I mostly work on things that affect how I play NetHack (e.g. my nethackrc), so please open an issue/PR if something doesn't work—it's likely I just don't use that feature and never ran into that particular issue.

Important

nethack-el only supports versions 3.6.7 and 3.7.0-WIP of NetHack. Please do not open issues with using nethack-el with versions of NetHack older than 3.6.7.

Previous repo: https://github.com/be11ng/nethack-el

Old website: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/nethack-el

Build and run

These instructions are known to work on *NIX systems and have been lightly tested on Windows.

Easy installation

• Install the Elisp sources

  • Add the nethack-el folder to your Emacs load-path.

  • Make sure you have all of your dependencies installed. You'll need make, gcc, bison or yacc, flex or lex, and the ncurses-dev library for your system.

    • On Windows you'll need MSYS2 with mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc and make installed, and make sure C:\msys64\usr\bin is in exec-path.

Note

nethack-el only supports NetHack 3.7.0 on Windows.

• Play with M-x nethack RET. This should automatically detect if NetHack w/ lisp patch is installed, and if not will attempt to build it from source.

Manual Build

• Download either nethack-367.tgz from https://nethack.org or git clone https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack.git (required for using NetHack-3.7 branch)

• Untar the package and apply the respective patch

  For example, if you were installing 3.6.7, you would do something like:

  $ tar xzf nethack-367-src.tgz
  $ cp enh-367.patch NetHack-NetHack-3.6.7_Released
  $ cd NetHack-NetHack-3.6.7_Released
  $ patch -p 1 < enh-367.patch
  

• Follow the instructions in sys/*/Install.* or NewInstall.*

  • This may be as simple as running sys/unix/setup.sh to copy the Makefiles.

  • For the 3.6.7/3.7.0 patch, included is a hints file under sys/unix/hints/lisp based on the default Linux one, which builds into wherever the PREFIX environment variable points to at runtime. You may want to edit the lisp hints file before running something along the lines of:

    $ cd sys/unix
    $ vi hints/lisp
    $ sh setup.sh hints/lisp
    

• Compile (from the toplevel)

  • Following the instructions as outlined so far, that would be:

    $ cd ../..
    $ make all
    $ make install
    

• Install the Elisp sources

  • Edit the Makefile in the nethack-el directory to set the location of your Emacs.

  • Byte compile (not strictly necessary).

    $ cd .. # Or wherever nethack-el is located
    $ make all
    

  • Place the *.elc or *.el files in your load-path.

  • Add the following lines somewhere inside your init.el:

    (autoload 'nethack "nethack" "Play Nethack." t)
    (setq nethack-program "/PATH/TO/PATCHED/nethack")

  • Play with M-x nethack RET.