Welcome! 👋 This is a 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 use a [VSCode extension](https://code.visualstudio.com/api/get-started/your-first-extension) to implement most of Void's functionality. Scroll down to see 1. How to build/contribute to the Extension, or 2. How to build/contribute to the full IDE (for more native changes).
4. Build the project. We created this build command so that we could run React in vscode - it converts `sidebar/index.tsx` into a CSS/JS bundle in `dist/`.
This will start a new instance of VSCode with the extension enabled. If this doesn't work, you can press <kbd>Ctrl+Shift+P</kbd>, select "Debug: Start Debugging", and select "VSCode Extension Development".
If you want to work on the full IDE, please follow the steps below. If you have any questions/issues, you can refer to VSCode's full [How to Contribute](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/wiki/How-to-Contribute) page, which is where the steps below come from. Also feel free to submit an issue or get in touch with us with any build errors.
To build on a Mac, open `void/` in VSCode. Make sure you've built the extension by following the steps above (or just run `cd ./extensions/void && npm run build && npm run compile && cd ../..`). Also make sure you have Python and XCode installed on your system (you probably do by default).
This should open up the built IDE after loading for some time. To see new changes without restarting the build, use <kbd>Ctrl+Shift+P</kbd> and run "Reload Window".
To bundle the IDE, run `npm run gulp vscode-darwin-arm64`. Here are the full options: `vscode-{win32-ia32 | win32-x64 | darwin-x64 | darwin-arm64 | linux-ia32 | linux-x64 | linux-arm}(-min)`
To build on Windows, please refer to [How to Contribute](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/wiki/How-to-Contribute). We recommend building on Mac; we're Windows users who switch to Mac to build right now.
If you're on Windows, we recommend running the project inside a dev container. VSCode should prompt you to do this automatically.
When the user submits a response or presses the apply/accept/reject button, we should add these events to the history, allowing the user to undo/redo them. Right now there is unexpected behavior if the user tries to undo or redo their changes.
When the user presses ctrl+k, an input box should appear inline with the code that they were selecting. This is somewhat difficult to do because an extension alone cannot do this, and it requires creating a new component in the IDE. We think you can modify vscode's built-in "codelens" or "zone widget" components, but we are open to alternatives.
Eventually, we want to build a convenient API for creating AI tools. The API will provide methods for creating the UI (showing an autocomplete suggestion, or creating a new diff), detecting event changes (like `onKeystroke` or `onFileOpen`), and modifying the user's file-system (storing indexes associated with each file), making it much easier to make your own AI plugin. We plan on building these features further along in timeline, but we wanted to list them for completeness.
Please don't make big refactors without speaking with us first. We'd like to keep the codebase similar to vscode so we can periodically rebase, and if we have big changes that gets complicated.
- Your PR should contain a description that first explains at a high level what you did, and then describes the exact changes you made (and to which files). Please don't use vague statements like "refactored code" or "improved types" (instead, describe what code you refactored, or what types you changed).
