Setting Up Zed Code Editor on Windows (AMD64)

Setting Up Zed on Windows: My Journey

I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz around Zed, a modern code editor built with Rust, and decided to give it a shot. The catch? It’s not officially available as a downloadable binary for Windows yet, so I had to build it myself. Here’s how that went down.

Initial Setup

Building Zed on Windows seemed pretty straightforward at first:

  1. Clone the Zed repository.
  2. Install Rust and dependencies.
  3. Run cargo build and watch the magic happen.

Image: A screenshot of the Zed Download where windows section asks you to build it yourself.

But of course, it wasn’t that simple.

The First Hurdle: Spectre Mitigated MSVC Libraries

During the setup, I hit a roadblock when cargo complained about missing Spectre mitigated MSVC libraries. After some digging, I realized I had to manually install them via the Visual Studio Installer under Individual Components.

Image: Screenshot of Visual Studio Installer with the required components highlighted.

Running Zed: Debug Mode Surprises

After a long cargo build, I ran the debug build:

cargo run

It launched, but the logs weren’t pretty:

[ERROR blade_graphics::hal::surface] No composite alpha flag for transparency: OPAQUE | INHERIT
[ERROR zed] missing field `name` at line 17 column 1
[ERROR zed] Access is denied. (os error 5)

Despite the errors, the editor actually worked! Not sure what was breaking behind the scenes, but at least I had something running.

Image: Screenshot of Zed running on Windows.

The Release Build Saga

I thought I was done, but then the release build threw this error:

error: linking with `link.exe` failed: exit code: 1120

A quick search led me to this discussion, where a temporary fix was suggested:

[profile.release]
debug = false

After applying this, the build finally completed!

Next Steps

Now that Zed is running, I need to host the release build somewhere. Cloud storage options like S3 or Cloudflare R2 seem promising—I’ll explore those next.

For now, Zed is up and running on my machine, and I’m excited to dive into its features in a future post.

Image: A closing shot of Zed’s interface with some code open.

What’s Next?

I plan to explore Zed in-depth in a follow-up post. Also, I’ll be setting up a dedicated section on this blog where I keep track of all the tools, frameworks, and concepts I want to explore.

Stay tuned! And if you’ve built Zed on Windows, let me know how it went for you in the comments (once commenting system is setup).

Thanks for reading!