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: Returns in-memory collections with zero disk I/O overhead.
  • 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 both IAliasProvider and ITranslationProvider.

Key Implementation Highlights

• Alphabet Boundaries (InputRanges / OutputRanges): Declares CJK Ideograph blocks as the input range 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.
• Polyphonic Combinations (GetAliases(text)): Constructs a syllable map and generates all common pronunciation combinations connected with | (capped at 32 combinations to prevent combinatorial explosions), allowing parallel matching across all permutations.
• 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 seamlessly.

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 within Lertaro's user data directory, communicating via named pipes using JSON-RPC without polluting the system PATH.
• 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.