Note: Requires Visual Studio
Most of the existing guides I've seen either assume msys2, which I didn't intend on downloading or don't give a particularly useful amount of direction to someone who's not well versed with Visual Studio.
As a recent Windows adopter (hence my use of neovim), I wanted to lay out how to best build neovim.
I installed Visual Studio 2019 Community with a plethora of useful Cpp tools. It's quite a load on your hard drive so ensure you have at least 10 gb free if you have nothing installed.
As a minimum, ensure that the Desktop C++ tools and cmake with ninja are installed.
There are a handful of other configurations that are available, but for the time being I've only built it with x64 Debug
and x64 Release. I'm interested in the clang builds and possibly even the WSL builds as they exist; however, a cursory
attempt at running these immediately crashed.
This should run automatically without a CMakesettings.json file.
After this completes successfully, run the build. Note that if it doesn't complete successfully, I genuinely had success by closing Visual Studio, reloading it and trying again.
When in doubt, turn it off and turn it back on again I guess.
Generating cmake's cache generated a few hundred warnings for me, but no errors so note that that could happen.
Build Neovim on Windows using Visual Studio. MSBuild and building the repository won't be as simple as a classic
configure; make; make install
1> Command line: "cmd.exe" /c ""C:\PROGRAM FILES (X86)\MICROSOFT VISUAL STUDIO\2019\COMMUNITY\COMMON7\IDE\COMMONEXTENSIONS\MICROSOFT\CMAKE\CMake\bin\cmake.exe" -G "Ninja" -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH="C:\Users\Casey\Source\Repos\neovim\out\install\x64-Release" -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER:FILEPATH="C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2019/Community/VC/Tools/MSVC/14.26.28801/bin/HostX64/x64/cl.exe" -v -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="RelWithDebInfo" -DCMAKE_MAKE_PROGRAM="C:\PROGRAM FILES (X86)\MICROSOFT VISUAL STUDIO\2019\COMMUNITY\COMMON7\IDE\COMMONEXTENSIONS\MICROSOFT\CMAKE\Ninja\ninja.exe" "C:\Users\Casey\Source\Repos\neovim" 2>&1"
Runs the build.
Under the Build drop-down menu, you'll observe that underneath Build Directory will be an option to
Install nvim.
After running this, I was able to run the executable in ./out/install/x64-release/bin/nvim-qt.exe
While that path is a mouthful, especially if you defaulted to putting nvim in $HOME/source/repos/neovim, I simply added the icon to the start menu which I admittedly forget is an option in comparison to simply expecting binaries to show up in /usr/local/bin.
To be continued: Other observations for packages that seemed to be required not mentioned here, or other tips to get things working.
My device additionally has all of.:
- scoop
- choco
- git for windows
- clang
- clang-cl
- python3
- WSL
and many other things installed; so I can't deny that none of these being present and on the standard user $PATH didn't contribute to the general ease with which I built the standard configurations.