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 and YYYY 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:

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 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