Clave by Antasphere
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Clave on Windows, early

Luca Derumier Co-founder

Since v1.89.0 every Clave release carries a Windows installer. What works on Windows today, what does not yet, and what the first install looks like.

An installer window on a pale reef green ground.

Clave has a Windows build, and since 14 September it ships with every release. This post says what it is and what it is not yet.

Three months without a build

Windows installers shipped from v1.37.0 to v1.51.2, on 9 June 2026, and then stopped. Nobody noticed, because both causes were silent.

  • The install step rebuilt the terminal library, node-pty, from source. That needs a Visual Studio installation, which the build machine does not have, so every Windows build failed. The rebuild was never needed: node-pty ships prebuilt Windows binaries that load as they are.
  • The Windows build was triggered by a release being published. Once releases were made by CI, that event was never raised, so the build stopped running and stopped reporting its failures.

On 14 September we fixed both. The native rebuild is skipped on Windows, and the Windows build is now a job of the release workflow itself, run after the macOS job with the same tag. v1.89.0 was the first release with a Windows installer in three months.

What a release carries

Each release now attaches, beside the macOS files:

  • clave-<version>-setup.exe, the installer;
  • its blockmap;
  • latest.yml, the feed the Windows updater reads.

No release had carried latest.yml before, so the Windows installs from June could never update themselves.

The installer is x64. Windows on ARM runs it under emulation.

The site reads the installer from the latest release. On the home page, a Windows visitor is offered Download for Windows as the main button; the download page shows both platforms side by side. The Windows button appears by itself once a release carries an installer, so a release and the site never need coordinating.

The installer is not signed

We ship the installer unsigned for now: there is no Windows code-signing certificate yet, and it is a separate purchase. Windows treats a new unsigned program with suspicion, and you will see it.

  • Edge may hold the download as not commonly downloaded and ask you, twice, to keep it.
  • SmartScreen then stops the installer. Choose More info, then Run anyway.

If Edge leaves you with an unfinished .crdownload file, downloading the installer with curl.exe from PowerShell skips the browser entirely.

What does not work yet

The code has a real Windows branch for terminals, and sessions run. Three things stay macOS-only:

  • State dots. The hooks that tell Clave whether an agent is working, waiting or done return nothing on Windows, so tabs do not show that state.
  • Session persistence. On macOS, sessions survive through tmux. tmux is disabled on Windows.
  • Pi. Pi sessions do not start on Windows.

None of these has a date, and none has a ticket yet.

Why early

The first install of v1.89.0 on a Windows machine was on 15 September. It installed and it ran, and beyond that it has not been exercised much yet. That is why we call it early, and we would rather say so than let you find out.

If something breaks on Windows, the issues page is where we want to hear about it.

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