This is the official guide on how to contribute to Void. We want to make it as easy as possible to contribute, so if you have any questions or comments, reach out via email or discord!
We [highly recommend reading this](https://github.com/voideditor/void/blob/main/VOID_CODEBASE_GUIDE.md) guide that we put together on Void's sourcecode if you'd like to add new features.
If you're making changes to Void's code as a contributor, you'll want to run a local version of Void to make sure your changes worked. Developer mode lets you do this. Here's how to use it.
If you're using a Windows computer, first get [Visual Studio 2022](https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/thank-you-downloading-visual-studio/?sku=Community) (recommended) or [VS Build Tools](https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/thank-you-downloading-visual-studio/?sku=BuildTools) (not recommended). If you already have both, you might need to run the next few steps on both of them.
Here's how to start changing Void's code. These steps cover everything from cloning Void, to opening a Developer Mode window where you can play around with your updates.
- You won't see your changes unless you press <kbd>Ctrl+R</kbd> (<kbd>Cmd+R</kbd>) inside the new window to reload. Alternatively, press <kbd>Ctrl+Shift+P</kbd> and `Reload Window`.
- You might want to add the flags `--user-data-dir ./.tmp/user-data --extensions-dir ./.tmp/extensions` to the command in step 4, which lets you reset any IDE changes you made by deleting the `.tmp` folder.
- You can kill any of the build scripts by pressing `Ctrl+D` in its terminal. If you press `Ctrl+C` the script will close but will keep running in the background.
- Make sure you followed the prerequisite steps above.
- Make sure you have Node version `20.18.2` (the version in `.nvmrc`).
- You can do this without changing your global Node version using [nvm](https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm): run `nvm install`, followed by `nvm use` to install the version in `.nvmrc` locally.
- Make sure the path to your Void folder does not have any spaces in it.
- If you get `"TypeError: Failed to fetch dynamically imported module"`, make sure all imports end with `.js`.
- If you get an error with React, try running `NODE_OPTIONS="--max-old-space-size=8192" npm run buildreact`.
- If you see missing styles, wait a few seconds and then reload.
- If you get errors like `npm error libtool: error: unrecognised option: '-static'`, when running ./scripts/code.sh, make sure you have GNU libtool instead of BSD libtool (BSD is the default in macos)
- If you get errors like `The SUID sandbox helper binary was found, but is not configured correctly` when running ./scripts/code.sh, run
`sudo chown root:root .build/electron/chrome-sandbox && sudo chmod 4755 .build/electron/chrome-sandbox` and then run `./scripts/code.sh` again.
- If you have any other questions, feel free to [submit an issue](https://github.com/voideditor/void/issues/new). You can also refer to VSCode's complete [How to Contribute](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/wiki/How-to-Contribute) page.
To build Void from the terminal instead of from inside VSCode, follow the steps above, but instead of pressing <kbd>Cmd+Shift+B</kbd>, run `npm run watch`. The build is done when you see something like this:
Void's maintainers distribute Void on our website and in releases. Our build pipeline is a fork of VSCodium, and it works by running GitHub Actions which create the downloadables. The build repo with more instructions lives [here](https://github.com/voideditor/void-builder).
If you want to completely control Void's build pipeline for your own internal usage, which comes with a lot of time cost (and is typically not recommended), see our [`void-builder`](https://github.com/voideditor/void-builder) repo which builds Void and contains a few important notes about auto-updating and rebasing.
We don't usually recommend building a local executible of Void - typically you should follow the steps above to distribute a complete executible with the advantages of VSCodium baked-in, or you should just use Developer Mode to run Void locally which is much faster. If you're certain this is what you want, see details below.
Make sure you've already entered Developer Mode with Void first, then run one of the following commands. This will create a folder named `VSCode-darwin-arm64` or similar outside of the void/ repo (see below).
