Get the latest Edacious Windows binary package from the download page. You can unpack the archive to a location such as C:\Program Files\Edacious.

Start Visual Studio and bring up Tools / Options. Select Projects and Solutions / VC++ Directories. In the Show directories for field, select the option Include files. If you have unpacked the Edacious SDK package into C:\Program Files\Edacious, for example, insert the line:

  C:\Program Files\Edacious\include

Now select Show directories for / Library files and insert the line:

  C:\Program Files\Edacious\lib

Edacious is built on top of the Agar library. Precompiled binary packages of Agar are available from the Agar download page and are installed in the same way as Edacious. See the Agar installation instructions.

It is strongly recommended that you install a version of Agar compiled with threads support.

You can now create your application. In the Application Wizard, set Application type to Console application, check the Empty project box and click Finish.

In the Solution Explorer, go to Properties from the popup menu of your project. Click on Configuration Properties / Linker / System and set the SubSystem parameter to Windows (/SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS). Click on Configuration Properties / Linker / Input, and add the following to the Additional Dependencies field:

  ag_eda.lib
  ag_gui.lib
  ag_core.lib
  SDL.lib
  SDLmain.lib
  opengl32.lib
  freetype.lib

If you are using the nofreetype flavor of the Agar SDK, remove the freetype.lib line.

Add a new C++ file to Source Files in the Solution Explorer, such as main.cpp. The application should now compile and run properly. See the ./demos directory of the Edacious source for some example applications.

Note: If you want your application to be portable to other operating systems and other development environments, consider the BSDBuild utility. It can even generate project files for you.

If you are not using the precompiled SDK and would like to compile Edacious yourself, look for the project files included in the .\ProjectFiles\ directory in the Edacious source. Locate the .zip file matching your Visual C++ release, for example vs2005-windows.zip will work with all Visual C++ 2005 editions. There are also some flavors such as nothreads, which disable thread safety and nofreetype which does not depend on FreeType.

Unpack the archive into the very top Edacious source directory, such that Edacious.sln will end up in the same directory as Edacious's README file.

Open Edacious.sln with Visual Studio and you should now be able to compile the toolkit. Once Edacious is compiled, run INSTALL-SDK.EXE in the root of the Edacious source directory to install the libraries on your system. By default, they are installed into C:\Program Files\Edacious.