The common questions about running Codex Black Ed. in VS Code — providers, voice, skins, install, and your keys. Still stuck? Ask on the forum or contact us.
Codex Black Ed. (CBE) is a self-contained, black-themed AI coding assistant for VS Code. It is a polished, Claude Code-style panel that talks to any model and puts every provider, voice in and out, image paste, and 15+ swappable skins in a single panel inside your editor.
CBE talks to Anthropic Claude (including claude-opus-4-8, Sonnet, and Haiku), OpenAI (GPT-4o and family), Grok / xAI, Google Gemini (Pro / Flash), Azure OpenAI deployments, and local Ollama models. You switch providers from a dropdown, using a direct API where you have a key or a browser bridge where you have a login.
CBE works out of the box with no API keys for voice. For speech-to-text it supports ElevenLabs Scribe v1, Deepgram Nova-3 (direct), local realtime Whisper (whisper.cpp and faster-whisper, offline and keyless), Anthropic streaming STT via your Claude login, and a WebSpeech fallback that needs no setup. For text-to-speech it can read any response aloud using ElevenLabs turbo voices or the browser-native SpeechSynthesis (keyless), with a per-message read-aloud button.
Yes. Drop a screenshot or drag an image onto the composer and it queues an attachment and ships natively to any vision-capable model. There is no upload dance.
Skins change the entire look of the panel from a menu. CBE ships 15+ swappable skins including Codex Black, Aqua Dock, XFCE / Classic GTK, GNOME, KDE, macOS Dock, Terminal, Glassy, a pixel-pet Tamagotchi, plus Ubuntu, Arch, Red Hat, Mint, Office, and the default Claude look. Every skin is plain HTML/CSS, so you can edit one live in the in-app skin editor with Edit, Save, Save as New, or Restore Original.
v1.0.3 leans hard into voice and vision: two new keyless, offline local speech-to-text engines (whisper.cpp stream and faster-whisper) that transcribe as you speak with partial results about every 500 ms; Deepgram Nova-3 as a first-class direct STT provider; paste and drag-drop images on the composer; and an always-current model list that refreshes from each provider once a day so new releases like claude-opus-4-8 show up without an extension update.
CBE ships as a standard VS Code .vsix extension. Download the .vsix (or the .zip if your browser blocks the .vsix, then unzip it) and install it with: code --install-extension codex-black-ed-1.0.3.vsix. Then open the panel by running "Codex Black: Open Panel" from the Command Palette or pressing Ctrl+Shift+B (Cmd+Shift+B on macOS), choose a model in Settings, drop in your API keys (or use a keyless voice plus browser-bridge path), and start chatting.
CBE is self-contained. It does not hook or depend on any other extension at runtime, and your API keys live in your local config. Nothing routes through us - your keys stay on your machine.
No. CBE is standalone and self-contained: it does not hook or depend on any other extension at runtime.
You can reach us through the contact form at /contact.php, by phone at 724-431-5207, or by email at trenttompkins@gmail.com. There is also a community forum at forum.codexblack.top.
Grab the extension from the install steps, or head back to the home page.
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