create-plugin

Installation
SKILL.md

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:

Installs
1
Repository
marcus/sidecar
GitHub Stars
1.1K
First Seen
Oct 1, 2026