Building Zed for Windows

[!NOTE] The following commands may be executed in any shell.

Repository

Clone down the Zed repository.

Dependencies

  • Install Rust. If it's already installed, make sure it's up-to-date:

    rustup update
    
  • Install the Rust wasm toolchain:

    rustup target add wasm32-wasi
    
  • Install Visual Studio with optional component MSVC v*** - VS YYYY C++ x64/x86 build tools and install Windows 11 or 10 SDK depending on your system

[!NOTE] v*** is your VS version and YYYY is year when your VS was released.

Backend dependencies

[!WARNING] This section is still in development. The instructions are not yet complete.

If you are developing collaborative features of Zed, you'll need to install the dependencies of zed's collab server:

Alternatively, if you have Docker installed you can bring up all the collab dependencies using Docker Compose:

docker compose up -d

Building from source

Once you have the dependencies installed, you can build Zed using Cargo.

For a debug build:

cargo run

For a release build:

cargo run --release

And to run the tests:

cargo test --workspace

Troubleshooting

Can't compile zed

Before reporting the issue, make sure that you have the latest rustc version with rustup update.

Cargo errors claiming that a dependency is using unstable features

Try cargo clean and cargo build.