Plugins — Extending the Native GUI

The Pytigon desktop client uses a plugin system to extend functionality without modifying core code.

Plugin Architecture

Plugins are Python modules that are dynamically discovered, downloaded, and initialized at application startup.

Plugin Discovery

The plugin system searches three directories: - pytigon_path/appdata/plugins/ — Built-in plugins - data_path/plugins/ — User-installed plugins - cwd/plugins/ — Application-specific plugins

Auto-Loading

Plugins in an auto/ subdirectory or listed in auto_plugins configuration are loaded automatically at startup. Manual plugins can be loaded on demand.

Plugin Initialization

Each plugin module can expose an init_plugin(app, frame, panels) function:

def init_plugin(app, frame, panels):
    """Called when the plugin is loaded.

    Args:
        app: The wx.App instance
        frame: The main application frame
        panels: Available panel containers
    """
    # Register custom controls, toolbar buttons, or modify the UI
    pass

Plugin Installation

  1. Plugins are distributed as ZIP files
  2. The client downloads plugins from /schsys/plugins/<plugin>/ endpoint
  3. ZIP files are extracted into plugins_cache/
  4. Both standard and custom plugins are supported

Plugin Capabilities

Plugins can: - Register custom controls — Add new wxPython widgets or modify existing ones via the guictrl.factory system - Add toolbar buttons — Extend toolbars with custom actions - Modify namespace — Dynamically extend guictrl.ctrl namespace (e.g., HTML2 viewer class is set by webview plugins like cef or wxwebview) - Create child pages — new_plugin_child_page() creates dynamic notebook pages from plugin data - Handle events — Connect to the signal/event system

Configuration

Plugin names are parsed from configuration data rows with data == "plugins". Values are semicolon-separated plugin paths, e.g.:

standard/keymap;standard/install

This sets app.plugins with the list of active plugins.

Plugin Import

Use import_plugin() from guilib.tools to dynamically load plugins by dotted module name:

from pytigon_gui.guilib.tools import import_plugin
my_plugin = import_plugin('plugins.my_plugin')
?: Plugins ?: Plugins