Install¶
A prebuilt package¶
The alpha ships an AppImage, an Arch PKGBUILD and a .deb on the
releases page. The
AppImage needs nothing installed:
chmod +x ase-*.AppImage
./ase-*.AppImage
Each format is documented in
packaging/README.md.
From source¶
You need CMake ≥ 3.20, a C11/C++20 compiler, and Qt6 (Widgets). The first configure fetches Lua, Tree-sitter and its grammars, so it needs network access; everything is cached afterwards.
git clone https://github.com/saeeedhany/ase.git
cd ase
cmake -B build -DASE_BUILD_GUI=ON -DASE_BUILD_TESTS=ON
cmake --build build
ctest --test-dir build
The binary is build/gui/ase_gui. cmake --install build puts it on your
path along with a .desktop entry and an icon.
On Debian and Ubuntu the Qt dependency is qt6-base-dev.
Which platforms¶
Linux. That is where the GUI is built, tested and packaged, and it is what a release is a release for.
The core library is built and tested on macOS in CI too, and the GUI has no deliberate Linux dependency — but the GUI has never been built on either, so treat them as unverified rather than supported.
Windows is further behind: the core compiles there and three of its test
suites crash, and ase_process_spawn() is unimplemented, so the language
server and :compile are present and do nothing.
Headless¶
The editing engine is a C library with no Qt dependency at all, and can be built on its own:
cmake -B build -DASE_BUILD_GUI=OFF
cmake --build build
That gives you core/ — the piece table, undo, config, the LSP client,
the plugin host — without a GUI. See
ADR 0002 for why the split
exists.
-DASE_BUILD_GUI=ON requires -DASE_BUILD_SYNTAX=ON (the default).
Turning syntax off while keeping the GUI on is not a supported
combination.