Development

Build and check

You need stable Rust and a native toolchain (on Windows, the Visual Studio Build Tools with the C++ workload).

cargo run -- examples/demo   # the IDE on the multi-language demo project
cargo fmt --check
cargo clippy --locked --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test --locked

The CI runs the same checks on Windows and Linux for every pull request.

Hot reload

cargo dev                    # alias of: cargo run -- --dev
cargo dev -- examples/demo

The process watches src/, Cargo.toml and Cargo.lock. On each change it rebuilds the IDE in target/hot; when the build succeeds, the window is replaced by the new version, keeping the project, the tabs, unsaved text, the active tab, the panels and the window position. On a build error, the messages show in the console and the running IDE goes on. The shell of the built-in terminal restarts at each reload. Closing the window stops dev mode.

Interface languages

The texts of the interface live in locales/<identifier>.json files (en_US, fr_FR): the one at the root for the IDE, and the locales folder of each plugin or language for its own texts (src/plugins/builtins/git/locales/fr_FR.json), under keys prefixed by its name (git.push). build.rs embeds them in the executable.

In the code, a text is named by its key: tr!("save"), or trf!("files_count", count = n) for a text with values ("{count} files"). A language is added with its <identifier>.json files, whose language key is the name shown in the settings. Tests check that every language has every key, with the same placeholders, and that the code only uses known keys.

Architecture

Path	Content
src/main.rs	Entry point of the IDE
src/app.rs, src/app/	The shell of the IDE (title bar, rails, tool windows, tabs, editor, status bar, dialogs), shortcuts and document life cycle; the Projects, Settings and Plugins pages, run configurations, Reformat code, Go to symbol
src/ui.rs	The look and feel shared with the plugins: themes, fonts, icons, widgets
src/highlight.rs	Syntax highlighting
src/editor.rs, src/editor/	The editor: actions, completion popup and tooltips (assist.rs), folding
src/languages/	Code intelligence: mod.rs (types, Provider, Service), lsp/ (Language Server Protocol client and the generic provider of a language with a server), javascript/, typescript/, rust/, java/, format.rs, syntax.rs
src/features/	Problems window and project search
src/project.rs	Documents, language detection, file access
src/terminal*.rs, src/wsl.rs	Pseudo-terminal, shells, VT100 screen, links, WSL
src/plugins/	builtin.rs (the BuiltinPlugin and Host contract), external.rs (JSON manifests) and builtins/ (Git, Markdown, Mermaid, MCP, Node.js, Maven, Gradle, Translations, Kubernetes, viewers…)
src/graph/	The context graph
src/i18n.rs, locales/	Interface languages
src/cli.rs	The atelier <path> command and the hand-off to a running IDE
src/dev.rs	Dev mode: rebuild and hot reload
src/bin/atelier.rs, src/bin/atelier/	The launcher (bootstrap): updates, startup window
installer/	The Windows installer (Inno Setup) and the atelier command
build.rs	Collects the icons and the locales, and gives the Windows executables their name and icon
docs/	This documentation (VitePress)

Documentation

The documentation is a VitePress site in docs/, built with Bun, in English (root) and French (docs/fr/, same paths). Each page exists in both languages.

cd docs
bun install
bun run dev       # http://localhost:5173/atelier-ide/
bun run build     # checks the links too

It is deployed to GitHub Pages by .github/workflows/docs.yml on every push to main that touches docs/.