void/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Void

Welcome! 👋

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!

There are a few ways to contribute:

• 💫 Complete items on the Roadmap.
• 💡 Make suggestions in our Discord.
• 🪴 Start new Issues - see Issues.

Codebase Guide

We highly recommend reading this article on VSCode's sourcecode organization too. Void's codebase is pretty simple when you know what a service is and what browser/ and common/ mean, and the article covers all the jargon.

Most of Void's code lives in the folder src/vs/workbench/contrib/void/.

Building Void

a. Build Prerequisites - Mac

If you're using a Mac, you need Python and XCode. You probably have these by default.

b. Build Prerequisites - Windows

If you're using a Windows computer, first get Visual Studio 2022 (recommended) or VS Build Tools (not recommended). If you already have both, you might need to run the next few steps on both of them.

Go to the "Workloads" tab and select:

• Desktop development with C++
• Node.js build tools

Go to the "Individual Components" tab and select:

• MSVC v143 - VS 2022 C++ x64/x86 Spectre-mitigated libs (Latest)
• C++ ATL for latest build tools with Spectre Mitigations
• C++ MFC for latest build tools with Spectre Mitigations

Finally, click Install.

c. Build Prerequisites - Linux

First, run npm install -g node-gyp. Then:

• Debian (Ubuntu, etc): sudo apt-get install build-essential g++ libx11-dev libxkbfile-dev libsecret-1-dev libkrb5-dev python-is-python3.
• Red Hat (Fedora, etc): sudo dnf install @development-tools gcc gcc-c++ make libsecret-devel krb5-devel libX11-devel libxkbfile-devel.
• Others: see How to Contribute.

d. Building Void

To build Void, open void/ inside VSCode. Then open your terminal and run:

1. npm install to install all dependencies.
2. npm run watchreact to build Void's browser dependencies like React. (If this doesn't work, try npm run buildreact).
3. Build Void.
   • Press Cmd+Shift+B (Mac).
   • Press Ctrl+Shift+B (Windows/Linux).
   • This step can take ~5 min. The build is done when you see two check marks (one of the items will continue spinning indefinitely - it compiles our React code).
4. Run Void.
   • Run ./scripts/code.sh (Mac/Linux).
   • Run ./scripts/code.bat (Windows).
5. Nice-to-knows.
   • You can always press Ctrl+R (Cmd+R) inside the new window to reload and see your new changes. It's faster than Ctrl+Shift+P and Reload Window.
   • You might want to add the flags --user-data-dir ./.tmp/user-data --extensions-dir ./.tmp/extensions to the above run command, which lets you delete the .tmp folder to reset any IDE changes you made when testing.
   • You can kill any of the build scripts by pressing Ctrl+D in VSCode terminal. If you press Ctrl+C the script will close but will keep running in the background (to open all background scripts, just re-build).

Building Void from Terminal

Alternatively, if you want to build Void from the terminal, instead of pressing Cmd+Shift+B you can run npm run watch. The build is done when you see something like this:

[watch-extensions] [00:37:39] Finished compilation extensions with 0 errors after 19303 ms
[watch-client    ] [00:38:06] Finished compilation with 0 errors after 46248 ms
[watch-client    ] [00:38:07] Starting compilation...
[watch-client    ] [00:38:07] Finished compilation with 0 errors after 5 ms

Common Fixes

• Make sure you followed the prerequisite steps.
• Make sure you have Node version 20.18.2 (the version in .nvmrc)!
• If you get "TypeError: Failed to fetch dynamically imported module", make sure all imports end with .js.
• If you see missing styles, wait a few seconds and then reload.
• If you have any questions, feel free to submit an issue. You can also refer to VSCode's complete How to Contribute page.

Packaging

We don't usually recommend packaging. Instead, you should probably just build. If you're sure you want to package Void into an executable app, make sure you've built 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). Be patient - packaging can take ~25 minutes.

Mac

• npm run gulp vscode-darwin-arm64 - most common (Apple Silicon)
• npm run gulp vscode-darwin-x64 (Intel)

Windows

• npm run gulp vscode-win32-x64 - most common
• npm run gulp vscode-win32-ia32

Linux

• npm run gulp vscode-linux-x64 - most common
• npm run gulp vscode-linux-arm
• npm run gulp vscode-linux-ia32

Output

This will generate a folder outside of void/:

workspace/
├── void/   # Your Void fork
└── VSCode-darwin-arm64/ # Generated output

Distributing

Void's maintainers distribute Void on our website and in releases. If you'd like to see the scripts to convert Mac .app -> .dmg, Windows folder -> .exe, and Linux folder -> appimage for distribution, feel free to reach out.

Pull Request Guidelines

• Please submit a pull request once you've made a change.
• No need to submit an Issue unless you're creating a new feature that might involve multiple PRs.
• Please don't use AI to write your PR 🙂