40: How do I make Emacs recognize my compiler's funny error messages? The variable compilation-error-regexp-alist helps control how Emacs parses your compiler output. It is a list of triples of the form: (REGEXP FILE-IDX LINE-IDX) where REGEXP, FILE-IDX and LINE-IDX are strings. To help determine what the constituent elements should be, load compile.el and then use C-h v compilation-error-regexp-alist RET to see the current value. A good idea is to look at compile.el itself as the comments included for this variable are quite useful -- the regular expressions required for your compiler's output may be very close to one already provided. Once you have determined the proper regexps, use the following to inform Emacs of your changes: (setq compilation-error-regexp-alist (cons '(REGEXP FILE-IDX LINE-IDX) compilation-error-regexp-alist))