Building Zed for Windows

The following commands may be executed in any shell.

Repository

Clone down the Zed repository.

Dependencies

  • Install rustup

  • Install Visual Studio with the optional components MSVC v*** - VS YYYY C++ x64/x86 build tools and MSVC v*** - VS YYYY C++ x64/x86 Spectre-mitigated libs (latest) (v*** is your VS version and YYYY is year when your VS was released. Pay attention to the architecture and change it to yours if needed.)

  • 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

  • Install CMake (required by a dependency). Or you can install it through Visual Studio Installer, then manually add the bin directory to your PATH, for example: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\CMake\CMake\bin.

If you can't compile Zed, make sure that you have at least the following components installed:

{
  "version": "1.0",
  "components": [
    "Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.CoreEditor",
    "Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.CoreEditor",
    "Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.Tools.x86.x64",
    "Microsoft.VisualStudio.ComponentGroup.WebToolsExtensions.CMake",
    "Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.CMake.Project",
    "Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.Windows11SDK.26100",
    "Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.Runtimes.x86.x64.Spectre"
  ],
  "extensions": []
}

The list can be obtained as follows:

  • Open the Visual Studio Installer
  • Click on More in the Installed tab
  • Click on Export configuration

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, optionally you can add the livekit-server binary to your PATH.

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

docker compose up -d

Notes

You should modify the pg_hba.conf file in the data directory to use trust instead of scram-sha-256 for the host method. Otherwise, the connection will fail with the error password authentication failed. The pg_hba.conf file typically locates at C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\17\data\pg_hba.conf. After the modification, the file should look like this:

# IPv4 local connections:
host    all             all             127.0.0.1/32            trust
# IPv6 local connections:
host    all             all             ::1/128                 trust

Also, if you are using a non-latin Windows version, you must modify thelc_messages parameter in the postgresql.conf file in the data directory to English_United States.1252 (or whatever UTF8-compatible encoding you have). Otherwise, the database will panic. The postgresql.conf file should look like this:

# lc_messages = 'Chinese (Simplified)_China.936' # locale for system error message strings
lc_messages = 'English_United States.1252'

After this, you should restart the postgresql service. Press the win key + R to launch the Run window. Type the services.msc and hit the OK button to open the Services Manager. Then, find the postgresql-x64-XX service, right-click on it, and select Restart.

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. The package is available for UCRT64, MINGW64 and CLANG64 repositories. To download it, run

pacman -Syu
pacman -S $MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX-zed

then you can run zed in a shell.

You can see the build script for more details on build process.

Please, report any issue in msys2/MINGW-packages/issues first.

Troubleshooting

Setting RUSTFLAGS env var breaks builds

If you set the RUSTFLAGS env var, it will override the rustflags settings in .cargo/config.toml which is required to properly build Zed.

Since these settings can vary from time to time, the build errors you receive may vary from linker errors, to other stranger errors.

If you'd like to add extra rust flags, you may do 1 of the following in .cargo/config.toml:

Add your flags in the build section

[build]
rustflags = ["-C", "symbol-mangling-version=v0", "--cfg", "tokio_unstable"]

Add your flags in the windows target section

[target.'cfg(target_os = "windows")']
rustflags = [
    "--cfg",
    "windows_slim_errors",
    "-C",
    "target-feature=+crt-static",
]

Or, you can create a new .cargo/config.toml in the same folder as the Zed repo (see below). This is particularly useful if you are doing CI builds since you don't have to edit the original .cargo/config.toml.

upper_dir
├── .cargo          // <-- Make this folder
│   └── config.toml // <-- Make this file
└── zed
    ├── .cargo
    │   └── config.toml
    └── crates
        ├── assistant
        └── ...

In the new (above) .cargo/config.toml, if we wanted to add --cfg gles to our rustflags, it would look like this

[target.'cfg(all())']
rustflags = ["--cfg", "gles"]

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

Invalid RC path selected

Sometimes, depending on the security rules applied to your laptop, you may get the following error while compiling Zed:

error: failed to run custom build command for `zed(C:\Users\USER\src\zed\crates\zed)`

Caused by:
  process didn't exit successfully: `C:\Users\USER\src\zed\target\debug\build\zed-b24f1e9300107efc\build-script-build` (exit code: 1)
  --- stdout
  cargo:rerun-if-changed=../../.git/logs/HEAD
  cargo:rustc-env=ZED_COMMIT_SHA=25e2e9c6727ba9b77415588cfa11fd969612adb7
  cargo:rustc-link-arg=/stack:8388608
  cargo:rerun-if-changed=resources/windows/app-icon.ico
  package.metadata.winresource does not exist
  Selected RC path: 'bin\x64\rc.exe'

  --- stderr
  The system cannot find the path specified. (os error 3)
warning: build failed, waiting for other jobs to finish...

In order to fix this issue, you can manually set the ZED_RC_TOOLKIT_PATH environment variable to the RC toolkit path. Usually, you can set it to: C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\<SDK_version>\x64.

See this issue for more information.

Build fails: Path too long

You may receive an error like the following when building

error: failed to get `pet` as a dependency of package `languages v0.1.0 (D:\a\zed-windows-builds\zed-windows-builds\crates\languages)`

Caused by:
  failed to load source for dependency `pet`

Caused by:
  Unable to update https://github.com/microsoft/python-environment-tools.git?rev=ffcbf3f28c46633abd5448a52b1f396c322e0d6c#ffcbf3f2

Caused by:
  path too long: 'C:/Users/runneradmin/.cargo/git/checkouts/python-environment-tools-903993894b37a7d2/ffcbf3f/crates/pet-conda/tests/unix/conda_env_without_manager_but_found_in_history/some_other_location/conda_install/conda-meta/python-fastjsonschema-2.16.2-py310hca03da5_0.json'; class=Filesystem (30)

In order to solve this, you can enable longpath support for git and Windows.

For git: git config --system core.longpaths true

And for Windows with this PS command:

New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem" -Name "LongPathsEnabled" -Value 1 -PropertyType DWORD -Force

For more information on this, please see win32 docs

(note that you will need to restart your system after enabling longpath support)