I built Forger, a standalone Electron app that bundles a file
explorer, Monaco editor, AI chat, Git, and a real TTY terminal into one
window — with an agent loop that lists, reads, searches, and edits
files across multiple steps, all behind approval dialogs.
Repo: https://github.com/cuculhart/forger-ide
Setup guide: https://cuculhart.com/forger-howto.en.html
Not a VS Code fork, not an extension — a single exe.
Why I built it
Doing contract work, I kept hitting the same walls:
- Confidential code can’t go to vendor clouds. In contract work you handle code and engineering knowledge that simply may not pass through someone else’s servers.
- Orgs that can’t approve $20/mo subscriptions. There are still plenty of organizations where a monthly AI IDE subscription is a hard sell.
- VS Code extension agents get tangled. Extensions are convenient, but they also collide with each other — Copilot interference being the usual suspect.
- Unapproved rewrites are a review burden. When the AI silently rewrites code, the human reviewer pays the cognitive cost. So every write, diff edit, and command goes through an approval dialog, and checkpoint/rollback undoes only the AI’s changes.
- Docker-in-Docker tools are heavy. Nice, but a hard setup for beginners. I wanted a single exe that just runs.
- Beginners need visible panes. Explorer, editor, console, and AI chat as separate, obvious panes is simply easier to learn.
Nothing matched all of this — so I built it, with AI, in under 3 days.
Features
- Free + BYOK — bring your own Gemini API key, pay Google directly for what you use. No subscription, no markup.
- Fully offline option — point it at Ollama (Gemma, Qwen, …) and every request goes to localhost only. Your code never leaves the machine.
- No telemetry — the only network calls go to the LLM endpoint you configure. Source-available, so you can verify that yourself.
- Human-in-the-loop — writes are confined to the project root; file creation, diff edits, and shell commands all require approval.
- LiteLLM proxy support — real API keys never sit on the client.
-
Token-efficient context — the AI gets the file tree and fetches
contents on demand via
// GREP:/// READ_FILE:commands. - Cheap by default — Gemini 3.8 Flash is at introductory pricing (half the standard rate) through the end of 2026, and even cheaper models like 3.5 Flash-Lite are selectable.
Tech stack
Electron / React / TypeScript / Monaco Editor / Gemini API & Ollama /
Vite
License
FSL-1.1-MIT (source-available). Free to use, modify, fork, and
redistribute for any non-competing purpose — including commercial work
inside your company. The one restriction: you can’t sell it (or a
renamed clone) as a competing product. Each release automatically
converts to MIT two years after publication.
Honest limitations
It’s chat/agent-centric (no inline completions), there’s no codebase
index (tree + on-demand reads instead), editor tabs don’t exist yet,
and it’s Windows-first with the UI in English/Japanese.
Roadmap
Considering PDF/image recognition, making the agent loop more reliable
on small local models, and chat improvements (multiple chat tabs).
Feedback and bug reports welcome via
GitHub Issues.