How to completely remove my Emacs?

apt uninstall make emacs

54,184

Solution 1

apt-get can not detect the applications which you have installed from source.Actually every source file will have uninstall script also but unfortunately you have removed the source file.

You may still do this. In the terminal type as

locate emacs

it will list all it footprints in the system , then remove those emacs footprints by using rm command carefully.

Solution 2

You haven't installed Emacs with the package manager. As you have installed it from source tarball, try this way.

Check emacs version.
```
$ emacs --version
```
Download the same emacs version you have installed in the past.
```
$ wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/emacs-$VERSION.tar.xz
```
Extract tarball.
```
$ tar xJvf emacs-$VERSION.tar.xz
```
Run ./configure to generate the make file. If you remember the option you have given when you install it, add those command line flags, too. (e.g. --with-x=no)
```
$ cd emacs-$VERSION
$ ./configure
```
Do make uninstall to uninstall.
```
$ sudo make uninstall
```

Enjoy!

Solution 3

It is not enough to

sudo apt-get remove emacs

You have to do

sudo apt-get remove emacs emacs23 emacs24 emacs25 emacs26 \
                    emacs-bin-common emacs-common emacs-el

Then

locate emacs

Solution 4

For me removing emacs-gtk worked

sudo apt-get remove emacs-gtk

Solution 5

Using checkinstall

Close all package managers
Download the archive again
Compile emacs again
Install the package checkinstall
```
sudo apt-get install checkinstall
```
Install emacs with
```
sudo checkinstall
```
to overwrite you previous installation and to have a deb package. That's the trick.
Remove the emacs package, the command is shown after the installation via checkinstall.

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54,184

Yang Wenhao

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Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Yang Wenhao over 1 year

I downloaded Emacs source files, and installed it using make. After installing Emacs successfully, I manually removed the downloaded source files to save disk space. Now I want to remove Emacs and I tried to use sudo apt-get purge emacs. But it says Emacs has not been installed and will not be removed. But I can run Emacs by typing emacs in the terminal. Also the command which emacs shows the result /usr/local/bin/emacs.

Why can't apt-get detect it? How can I remove Emacs completely in this situation? My OS is Ubuntu 12.04, and my Emacs version is 24.3.1.
Yang Wenhao over 10 years

So I should keep the source file in order to remove the application in the future. When I decide to remove it, I run make uninstall, and then delete the downloaded source file. Is that right? Should I run make clean after make uninstall?
Thomas Ward over 10 years

@YangWenhao It may be make remove or some other command, but yes, when you install software from source, you need to keep the source code around so you can do make uninstall or similar to remove the software. Source-built software isn't managed by the packaging system because it's not existing as a Debian package.
Yang Wenhao over 10 years

@ThomasW. Thank you for your help. I know the right way.
Steven K over 10 years

locate emacs will not "list all it footprints in the system", it will simply show you files which have 'emacs' in the name. With a program as large as emacs, many of the added files likely don't have 'emacs' in the name or path.
deadfish over 5 years

+ emacs24 too
haziz over 4 years

I am not sure this would help or apply to the OP. It looks like he compiled and installed from source.
wbadry almost 3 years

Thank you so much. This was exactly my problem.