windows.md

Compiling ImHex on Windows

On Windows, ImHex is built through msys2 / mingw's gcc.

1. Download and install msys2 from their website.
2. Open the MSYS2 MinGW x64 shell
3. Clone the repo using git clone https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex --recurse-submodules
4. Install all the dependencies using ./ImHex/dist/get_deps_msys2.sh
5. Build ImHex itself using the following commands:

cd ImHex
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "Ninja"                          \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release              \
  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="./install"      \
  -DIMHEX_USE_DEFAULT_BUILD_SETTINGS=ON   \
  ..
ninja install

ImHex will look for any extra resources either in various folders directly next to the executable or in %localappdata%/imhex

For low RAM-usage system, you can use mingw32-make -j N install instead, to reduce RAM usage at compile time. Where N is amount of jobs you are willling to run at once. Roughly ~1 GB of RAM usage per job.