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Welcome to the Black IDE Wiki

Welcome to the documentation wiki for Black IDE—a custom, telemetry-free distribution of VS Code built on VSCodium, featuring a built-in AI coding assistant and agentic loop engine natively integrated in the activity bar.

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💡 About Black IDE

Black IDE provides a clean, privacy-respecting development environment with a powerful, persistent AI agent that works in a continuous loop to solve your tasks.

Core Features

1. Telemetry-Free by Default: Built-in telemetry, tracking, and reporting endpoints are completely patched out of the codebase.
2. Integrated AI Agent (Black IDE Chat): An autonomous agent that reads, writes, audits, and executes commands inside a sandboxed loop.
3. Multi-Agent Pipeline: From-scratch builds route through 7 specialized agents with a plan-approval gate, executing inside an isolated git worktree.
4. Surgical Undo System: The checkpoint manager calculates atomic git-style diffs for all AI edits, letting you revert changes easily.
5. Isolated Parallel Subagents: Spawn multiple subagents safely using automated Git worktrees to prevent index locks or conflicts.
6. Inline Editor Chat (Cmd+I): Fast, editor-native inline refactoring with line offset tracking and visual change highlights.
7. Command Safety Policy: Every shell command is gated by an allow/deny policy with an unconditional hard-deny list for destructive operations.
8. Durable Project Memory: Architecture notes, ADRs, and feature status accrue as human-readable Markdown under .blackIDE/knowledge/.

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📖 Table of Contents

• Getting Started
  • Getting Started - Download, installation, and first steps.
  • Usage Guide - Portability settings, hotkeys, and opening Black IDE from the terminal.
• Core Privacy & Features
  • AI Agent - Providers, commands, slash commands, modes, safety policy, and project configuration.
  • Telemetry-Free Design - How Black IDE strips telemetry and safeguards your privacy.
  • Extensions & Marketplace - Using the Open VSX Registry and installing third-party extensions.
  • Extensions Compatibility - Compatible alternatives for proprietary Microsoft extensions.
  • GitHub Copilot - Setting up Copilot on a non-Microsoft build.
  • Accounts Authentication - Signing in to accounts and authentication providers.
• Developer Guides
  • Building from Source - Compiling and packaging Black IDE locally, and working on the agent extension.
  • Development Workflow - Branches, CI gates, test layers, publishing, and contributing.
  • Migration Guide - Transitioning your settings and extensions from VS Code or VSCodium.
  • Troubleshooting - Common issues, rendering fixes, and system configuration workarounds.
  • Patches - How the patch set is organized and the enterprise policy registry path.
  • Other Resources - What the reh and reh-web archives are.
• Architecture & Technical Documentation
  • Architecture & KT Guide - Detailed guide covering the event bus, agent loop, checkpoints, worktrees, and more.
  • Bengali KT Guide (বাংলা) - Bengali translation of the comprehensive technical guide.