When working in a project where some paths are not blacked yet, you may configure file discovery and run something like: `black .` Once you have this, you may need to integrate black in your editor, and some plugins end up piping from stdin: `stdin | black - --stdin-filename "$FILEPATH"` The problem is the integration will fail when trying to format a file being excluded by force-exclude directive. You can check other tools like ruff output unformatted stdin in this case: https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff/pull/8596 So they can have editor integrations such as: https://github.com/JoshHayes/emacs-ruff-format/blob/main/ruff-format.el#L43 Where they just pipe the content of the buffer to their cli