PRIVACY.md

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Privacy Policy — atomwrite

• Last updated: 2026-11-04 (atomwrite 0.1.38)

Summary

• atomwrite is a local CLI
• It has no telemetry, no analytics and no phone-home: nothing is collected, so there is no opt-in switch to turn on (an explicit opt-in would be required before any telemetry could be added)
• It never uploads the contents of your files
• The only network traffic the product starts itself is the one-time download of tree-sitter parsers and of the two OCR models, described in Network Access

What Runs Locally

• All file reads, writes, searches, backups and WAL sidecars execute on the machine that invokes the binary
• Configuration is CLI flags + XDG directories + .atomwrite.toml only, with no product ATOMWRITE_* runtime knobs (policy since v0.1.35, current line 0.1.38)
• The product code reads exactly one variable, CLAUDE_CODE_SESSION_ID, and only to key the per-session media cache, and the source guard carries that single allowlisted line
• The OS crates sys-locale and directories read LANG (and LANGUAGE, LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES on Unix), HOME and XDG_* for you, see Environment Reads By Dependencies
• doctor detects the host with local file probes only, and its locale check follows the OS locale through sys-locale, so LANG changes the reported locale
• Agent staging directories under .atomwrite/scratch/ are local workspace files, never uploaded
• atomwrite config set and config unset write only the XDG config.toml (mode 0600 on Unix) or the workspace .atomwrite.toml, atomically, and config list and config get only read them
• The watch, semantic-search and semantic-merge verbs work on local filesystem data only

Network Access

• Core read, write, edit, search, replace and every other verb need no network
• The AST features need the tree-sitter parsers, and the build ships none of them: outline, query and --syntax-check download the parser bundle the first time a language is used and the local cache has no copy
• The download comes from github.com/xberg-io/tree-sitter-language-pack (release assets), through the ureq HTTP client of the tree-sitter-language-pack 1.22.1 crate (ureq, rustls and ring are in the default binary)
• Measured on 2026-10-31 in the v1.22.1 manifest: about 22 MiB (23,031,807 bytes for linux-x86_64), written to $XDG_CACHE_HOME/tree-sitter-language-pack/v1.22.1/ (~/.cache/tree-sitter-language-pack/v1.22.1/ by default), and the six parsers this machine already extracted take 3.9 MiB
• The request carries no data from your files, the HTTP client adds its own standard request headers (not inspected for this document), and the host that serves the file sees the IP address of your machine, as with any download
• Later runs reuse the cache and make no request
• How to avoid the download: copy a warm cache directory from a connected machine to the same path, build without ast (cargo install atomwrite --no-default-features --features core), or do not use outline, query and --syntax-check
• transform uses the grammars compiled into ast-grep-language and does not use this download (measured in ADR-0057)
• read --ocr needs two models, and the build ships neither of them: the detection model text-detection-ssfbcj81.rten and the recognition model text-rec-checkpoint-s52qdbqt.rten are fetched the first time OCR runs on a machine whose cache has no copy
• The download comes from huggingface.co/robertknight/ocrs (resolve/main), through the ureq client, with a 64 MiB cap and a 120 second timeout per file, and the files land in $XDG_CACHE_HOME/atomwrite/models/ (~/.cache/atomwrite/models/ by default)
• The OCR request carries no data from your files, the host sees the IP address of your machine as with any download, and later runs reuse the cache and make no request
• read without --ocr, and every other verb, starts no connection and never touches this path
• How to avoid this download: pre-populate $XDG_CACHE_HOME/atomwrite/models/ with both files from a connected machine, or do not use read --ocr
• The OCR download is not checksum-verified, unlike the tree-sitter bundle, so a proxy in front of the host can serve a different file and the product will load it
• cargo install atomwrite downloads crates from crates.io, and that traffic is between your host and crates.io

Environment Reads By Dependencies

• Third-party code reads the process environment in three places, listed in ADR-0057 so that no reader finds them by surprise
• sys-locale reads LANGUAGE, LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES and LANG on Unix to detect the OS language for the UI
• directories reads HOME and XDG_CONFIG_HOME, XDG_DATA_HOME, XDG_CACHE_HOME, XDG_STATE_HOME on Linux to place the config, state and data paths
• tree-sitter-language-pack reads HOME and XDG_CACHE_HOME for the parser cache, and ureq reads ALL_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY, HTTP_PROXY and NO_PROXY (with lowercase variants) when it downloads a parser
• None of these values is sent anywhere by atomwrite

Files atomwrite Writes

• Config: config.toml under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/atomwrite/ (~/.config/atomwrite/ on Linux), mode 0600 on Unix, written only by config set and config unset
• Workspace config: .atomwrite.toml at the workspace root, written only by config set --scope workspace
• Locale preference: the single-line file locale in the same directory, mode 0600 when the platform allows, written only by locale --set
• Logs: only when log.file is true (default false), JSON lines under $XDG_STATE_HOME/atomwrite/logs/atomwrite.<date>.jsonl, rotated daily by default (log.rotation) and capped at 7 files
• Log lines hold diagnostic events and can include the file paths and the locale of the run, so treat them as sensitive when the paths are
• WAL journals: .atomwrite.journal.<target>.atomwrite.journal.json next to the target file, removed after a committed write and by wal-heal
• Backups: <file>.bak.<timestamp> next to the file, created by the mutating verbs and removed after a successful write by default (delete copies only with --backup or [defaults].backup = true, --keep-backup keeps the copy after success, and prune-backups removes old ones, measured on 2026-11-04)
• OCR models: the two .rten files under $XDG_CACHE_HOME/atomwrite/models/, written once by read --ocr on first use, and never removed by the product
• Session media cache: a <blake3> marker under $XDG_CACHE_HOME/atomwrite/media-sessions/<session>/, keyed by CLAUDE_CODE_SESSION_ID, so a picture or PDF page is sent once per session and never removed by the product
• The advisory lock is taken on the target file itself through File::try_lock, which is flock(2) on Unix and LockFileEx on Windows, so holding it writes nothing
• A sidecar .<target>.atomwrite.lock is created on a best-effort basis next to the target, and the write still proceeds on the inode lock when the directory does not allow creating it
• The sidecar keeps the literal name until .<target>.atomwrite.lock would pass 255 bytes, and past that it becomes a short BLAKE3 digest in the same directory, so the name holds no path beyond the target name
• On Unix the sidecar is unlinked when the last guard drops, a process killed by SIGKILL can leave one behind, and the next writer reuses and removes it; on Windows it is reused instead of unlinked
• Temporary files next to the target during a write
• Staging: .atomwrite/scratch/ in the workspace, created by scratch init
• Shell completion scripts when you run atomwrite completions --install
• Crash reports: the human-panic hook writes a report-<uuid>.toml file in the OS temporary directory when the program panics, with the OS name, the crate version, the panic message and a backtrace, and it can include paths that appear in them
• The crash report is a local file only and is never transmitted, you decide whether to attach it to an issue
• The parser cache described in Network Access

What Is Never Collected

• No analytics, crash-reporting service or usage beacon is embedded in the binary
• NDJSON output can contain file paths and content excerpts that you (or an agent) chose to process, so treat stdout as sensitive if those paths hold secrets

Personal Data And Locale

• The detected or chosen locale is treated as potentially personal data
• Minimization: only a language tag (en or pt-BR) is stored, as a single line in the locale file
• Retention: the file stays on your disk until you remove it, and atomwrite never copies it elsewhere
• Deletion: run atomwrite locale --clear, or delete the file at the preference_path that atomwrite locale prints
• The OS locale is read once per run and is not sent off the host
• Because nothing is sent off the host, atomwrite does not collect personal data in the sense of the GDPR (EU) or the LGPD (Brazil), and this is a description of the design, not legal advice

Third-Party Dependencies

• Upstream crates are governed by their own licenses (see deny.toml / cargo deny)
• If you enable tooling that calls external services (unrelated wrappers, agent hosts), those systems have separate privacy policies

Contact

• Maintainer: see Cargo.toml authors / repository listed in the package metadata