Building Zed for Windows
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 the optional component
MSVC v*** - VS YYYY C++ x64/x86 build tools
(v***
is your VS version andYYYY
is year when your VS was released) -
Install Windows 11 or 10 SDK depending on your system, but ensure that at least
Windows 10 SDK version 2104 (10.0.20348.0)
is installed on your machine. You can download it from the Windows SDK Archive
Backend dependencies
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
Installing from msys2
MSYS2 distribution provides Zed as a package mingw-w64-zed. 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.
You can see the build script for more details.
Please, report any issue in 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