Build for Windows from source

This page explains how to build Vicinae for Windows from source.

Only build Vicinae from source if you are planning on assisting with development. If you just want to use Vicinae, install it using the installer or the portable build.

Requirements

MSVC 19+ (Visual Studio 2019). We do not support building Vicinae with other compilers on Windows.
The cmake build system
The QT framework (MSVC build). We recommend aqtinstall to install QT.
perl is required to configure the KDE syntax highlighting package. You probably want to use Strawberry Perl.
Inno Setup if you need also need to make the installer.
Vicinae has several other dependencies, but they are either vendored or fetched automatically by CMake, so you don't need to do anything special about those.

We recommend using PowerShell 5 or higher for the steps that follow.

Clone the source code:

git clone https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae.git && cd vicinae

First you need to make sure the current shell environment has everything needed to build Vicinae. In particular, you should make sure that:

MSVC is in PATH (cl.exe). There are many ways to start a visual studio development environment. You can execute the ./scripts/devshell.ps1 script to do it for you.
QT is in PATH. Usually you need to add \C:\Qt\<version>\msvc2022_64\bin\ to your PATH.

Configure using the desired preset:

cmake --preset windows-relwithdebinfo

Then build:

cmake --build build-relwithdebinfo

Once built, you can find the portable build at build-relwithdebinfo/stage.

You can use scripts/mkinstaller.ps1 to make the Inno Setup installer:

# you can point it to any build directory
./scripts/mkinstaller.ps1 build-relwithdebinfo