Plugin list display + instructions

Firstly, really happy to see the progress on the plugins in the last month or so, some great features are being added to Joplin to make it truly indispensable.

I'm a little confused at the moment with the current Plugins settings menu item. Currently it defaults to displaying no plugins. There's an option to search for them, but if you don't know what plugins exist, then how do you know what to search for? I'm currently typing one of the vowels, like the letter 'e' to show a list of all the plugins.

Strikes me that the list should be there by default, or perhaps with a toggle to show/hide all, and perhaps a toggle for your own plugins. The toggle all could tie in with the search to filter the list down.

AFAIK there's no centralised resource for me to understand what plugins are available and how to use them. I appreciate that this would require some effort to compile. Perhaps building user instructions or even links to the Github page/discourse user instructions into the plugin architecture would solve the need to have somebody managing the plugins?

My current workflow is:

  1. Find plugin through typing a single common letter like 'e'.
  2. Choose a plugin from the list, Install it + restart
  3. Look around to see how it's changed the interface
  4. 9/10x not understand how the functionality has been updated, or how to use the plugin.
  5. Search the Discourse forum to find the plugin
  6. Find the thread
  7. Go through the thread to read about the functionality

I appreciate it's early days, but it'd be great to make these plugins more accessible to less IT/forum digging competent folks.

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If you click on "Browse all plugins", you'll see the list.

I'm not sure yet how to display all the plugins within the UI or even if we should do that at all, which is why I've added this link for now.

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Thanks for getting back to me @laurent.

This option doesn't show up on my version (1.7.3).

image

Personally it would make more sense to me if it wasn't hidden inside the user's plugin manage options, though I can't see it now anyhow.

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To give you an example of what I'm suggesting, Obsidian's plugin interface is very well done. You have an option to browse 3rd party/community plugins:

And on the list, you have the option to filter plugins, each plugin has a detailed explanation of how to use it.

Hope you're not upset when folks compare your product with someone else's!

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It looks like they're just pulling the Readme.md data from the Github repo. So it's up to the author of the plugin to ensure that there's some detailed documentation up there.

Yes the UI can definitely be improved. VSCode also displays plugins like this but the work involved to get to that level is a bit out of scope at this point. For now, I wanted to cover a few scenarios, with minimal dev work - installing from files, searching, browsing and updating plugins. It's all there now, and later we can incrementally improve all that.

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Cheers @laurent! Of course, didn't mean to bust your balls! Getting the architecture right of course is definitely the right priority. Great work so far!

Here's a hint: To browse all available plugins, just enter a space in the search field.

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