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:

Install Postgres
Install Livekit and Foreman

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

Installing from msys2

MSYS2 distribution provides Zed as a package. To download the prebuilt binary, run

pacman -Syu
pacman -S mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-zed

then you can run zed in a UCRT64 shell.

[!NOTE] Please, report any issue in https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages/issues first.

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.

`STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION`

This error can happen if you are using the "rust-lld.exe" linker. Consider trying a different linker.

If you are using a global config, consider moving the Zed repository to a nested directory and add a .cargo/config.toml with a custom linker config in the parent directory.

See this issue for more information #12041