Lertaro

Plugin Examples ​

To help developers understand how Lertaro.PluginSdk interfaces cooperate in real-world scenarios, this chapter analyzes four representative open-source plugins included in the Lertaro repository.

1. CoreExtensions —— Actions, Shell Menus & Quick Panel ​

The CoreExtensions plugin is Lertaro's core functionality bundle, implementing IPlugin, IActionProvider, IConfigurable, and multiple sub-providers.

Key Implementation Highlights ​

  • Static Result Actions (IActionProvider.GetActions()): Exposes the core file actions, including opening and locating items, copying paths and files, adding a result to Favorites, renaming items, shell commands, deletion, and administrator variants.
  • Native Shell Menu Integration (IDynamicActionProvider): Interacts with Windows Shell COM interfaces via ShellMenuActionProvider, rendering full Windows context menus (with cascading submenus like "Send to", 7-Zip, VS Code) directly inside Lertaro's Ctrl+O action menu.
  • Schema-Driven Configuration Forms (IConfigurable): Demonstrates defining configuration schemas with nested groups (Group), string lists (StringList), and hotkey recorders (Hotkey), rendering native UI forms in Settings without custom XAML.
  • Diverse Quick Panel Tabs (IQuickPanelTabProvider):
    • FavoritesTabProvider / HistoryTabProvider: serve the host's already-loaded favorites and history rather than re-reading them from disk; the history query is dispatched off the UI thread (Task.Run), so summoning the panel never waits on it.
    • WindowsRecentTabProvider: Crawls the Windows Recent folder on a background thread, resolves COM shortcut targets, truncates results, and populates Metadata.Modified for accurate sorting.
    • LastDirectoryTabProvider / RecentFilesTabProvider: Directly queries the host's ExplorerPathService and RecentFilesService.

2. PinyinAlias —— Non-ASCII Transliteration Engine ​

The PinyinAlias plugin provides full pinyin and initialism alias search support for Chinese filenames, implementing IAliasLiveMatcherProvider (an IAliasProvider) and ITranslationProvider.

Key Implementation Highlights ​

  • Alphabet Boundaries (InputRanges / OutputRanges): Declares one CJK Ideograph range (U+3007–U+9FFD) as the input boundary and lowercase a–z as the output range. The host uses these boundaries to partition mixed queries (e.g. 大cj matching 大长今) into literal and alias segments.
  • Pre-flight Fast Checks (CanHandle(text)): Scans for Chinese characters before generating aliases, returning false immediately for pure English strings to avoid allocation overhead.
  • Live Reading Match (IAliasLiveMatcherProvider): the readings are never written into the index. The plugin builds one immutable bit-parallel matcher per query term (2–63 ASCII letters/digits) and the host runs it over the candidate's own characters: every character consumes a non-empty prefix of one of its readings, so a hit is always one contiguous run and a polyphonic name costs nothing extra. GetAliases(text) now emits only the Simplified spelling of a Traditional name.
  • Embedded Localization & Thread-Safe Caching: Provides localized plugin display names via ITranslationProvider, caching parsed JSON tables inside a lock-guarded dictionary to avoid repeated disk reads.

3. FlowLauncherBridge —— Cross-Ecosystem Compatibility & Isolated Runtimes ​

The FlowLauncherBridge plugin demonstrates building a large-scale bridge system to integrate external community ecosystems into Lertaro.

Key Implementation Highlights ​

  • Multi-Language IPC Bridge: Runs Flow Launcher plugins written in C# (.NET), Python 3.12, Node.js v20 LTS, and standalone executables (.exe).
  • Isolated Self-Contained Runtimes: Deploys isolated Python and Node.js runtimes under Lertaro's shared data directory (SharedDataDirectory\FlowData\PythonEmbeded-{arch}), not the per-user data folder. Each plugin talks to its interpreter over redirected standard input/output carrying JSON-RPC — there is no named pipe, and the system PATH is never touched.
  • Dynamic Configuration & WebView2 Previews: Dynamically maps external SettingsTemplate.yaml/.json forms to PluginConfigSchema, and renders rich interactive HTML/WebView2 previews (e.g. MDict definitions, weather cards) inside QuickLook.

4. FileUnlocker —— File occupation release action ​

FileUnlocker demonstrates a focused action plugin that uses the Windows Restart Manager API through a small client wrapper.

Key Implementation Highlights ​

  • Single-selection guard: The action is offered only for one existing file, avoiding ambiguous requests against folders or multiple results.
  • Process inspection: It displays the locking process name, PID, and executable path, with a refresh operation for changing file state.
  • Request-based release: The plugin asks the owning processes to release the file and disables the release button while no process is detected or an operation is running.
  • Host-owned window frame: Its WPF view is placed in the SDK's themed PluginWindow dialog, so the plugin does not duplicate theme, DPI, taskbar, or Alt+Tab handling.