create-plugin

Create Plugin

This skill is the embedded class: a Go package compiled into Sidecar with its own Bubble Tea UI. If what you want is a tool's data in Sidecar — a searchable tab, rows that open into documents, panes beside a terminal — you almost certainly want a protocol plugin instead: an executable in any language answering five JSON methods, which Sidecar renders itself and which ships as a config entry rather than a Sidecar release. Read docs/guides/active/creating-plugins.md and stop here. Come back only when the screen itself is the point — a board, a queue, a layout the collection-and-document vocabulary cannot express — because everything below costs a release, a keymap pass, and a permanent place in the repository.

Architecture Overview

• Bubble Tea model: internal/app/model.go owns the active plugin index, dispatches key events, renders plugin views.
• Registry: internal/plugin/registry.go stores plugins, handles lifecycle with panic protection, keeps an unavailable map when Init fails (silent degradation).
• Plugin contract: internal/plugin/plugin.go defines the interface every plugin must satisfy.
• Context: internal/plugin/context.go provides WorkDir, ConfigDir, Adapters, EventBus, Logger, Epoch, and Keymap.
• Keymap: internal/keymap maps keys to command IDs. Footer/help reads bindings by context using Plugin.Commands() + Plugin.FocusContext().

Plugin Interface

Every plugin must implement all of these methods:

ID() string              // Stable kebab-case identifier
Name() string            // Short human label for headers/help
Icon() string            // Single-character glyph for tab strip
Init(ctx *Context) error // Lightweight setup; return error to degrade gracefully
Start() tea.Cmd          // Kick off async work (non-blocking)
Update(msg tea.Msg) (Plugin, tea.Cmd) // Pure state transition
View(width, height int) string        // Render within provided dimensions
IsFocused() bool         // Check focus state
SetFocused(bool)         // App calls this on tab switch
Commands() []plugin.Command           // Footer hints per context
FocusContext() string    // Current context name for keymap
Stop()                   // Idempotent cleanup