Install emacs without sudo?

If you can compile code, then just download a source distribution of emacs.

Instead of starting with ./configure, use the configure options to tell the build system where you want the files to end up. For example:

./configure --prefix=/home/abhi/emacs --bindir=/home/abhi/bin

will install all of emacs' support files under /home/abhi/emacs, and the emacs executables in /home/abhi/bin. If the latter is in your $PATH, which it usually is, then things should Just Work(sm).

After that you can

make && make install

without worrying about the installation putting files other than in your home directory.

(This is all based on your home directory being /home/abhi, of course. Edit as necessary.)

Installing from source, or manually downloading .rpms and extracting them are possible but hard because they all depend on other libs.

Here is a simple way using conda

conda install -c conda-forge emacs

If you dont have conda and like to install it, see [1]

emacs has been pre built for OS X and linux_64 platforms, see [2] for versions.

[1] https://conda.io/miniconda.html
[2] https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/emacs