Untested — at your own risk. Nothing on this page has been run on Windows. The editor’s libraries were checked to compile for it, from Linux; the window itself has never been built, let alone started, there. Expect it not to work, and expect nobody to have seen why.

Kaivalya Editor is written on Linux and released for Linux. Windows is not supported: there is no download for it, and nobody tests it there before a release. What there is: the code compiles for Windows, and this page says how to build it yourself and what you will find missing.

What you need

  • Rust, from rustup.rs. The project pins its compiler in rust-toolchain.toml; rustup reads that file and installs the right one the first time you build.
  • The Visual Studio Build Tools, with the Desktop development with C++ workload — rustup offers to install them. Some dependencies compile a little C.
  • Git for Windows, on your PATH. The editor reads repositories by itself, but fetch, push, pull and switching branches run git.

Build it

In a terminal, from a copy of the repository:

cargo build --release --locked

--locked builds exactly the dependency versions in Cargo.lock, the ones the editor is tested with on Linux. The editor is target\release\kaivalya-editor.exe: it runs from wherever you put it, nothing to install.

This is the editor without the heavy preview, the same build as make build-light on Linux. The heavy preview is a second program, built with:

cargo build --release --locked -p kve-preview --features heavy

and the editor looks for kve-preview.exe beside its own executable. It has never been built on Windows; try it if you want it.

Known limitations

  • Untested. The editor’s libraries — files, git, search, settings, markdown — are checked to compile for Windows. The interface itself and the UI framework’s Windows backend have never been built there.
  • No spelling check. Check spelling asks enchant-2, which Windows does not have; the command says enchant-2 is missing.
  • No Recycle Bin. Deleting from the explorer moves the file to the Linux desktop’s trash, .local\share\Trash under your HOME, which the Recycle Bin does not see. With no HOME set it fails with a message and deletes nothing.
  • No installer, no Start menu entry, no file associations. make install is for Linux only.
  • The executable bit. Windows has none, so a file committed from Windows is always committed as a plain file.
  • Where things are kept. Settings, themes and stylesheets are in %APPDATA%\kaivalya-editor\, the sessions and history in %APPDATA%\kaivalya-editor\ too — the Windows places for what Linux keeps in ~/.config and ~/.local/share.

If something else is broken, it is worth a report: it may be a one-line fix, as the last one was.