Interesting take on plugin management

[Daeraxa]

I've been following the progress of the Lite-XL editor (totally worth checking out, really interesting project that does things in a different way to quite a few other editors).

Brought this up in Discord as well but will get buried quickly.

Managing plugins is basically just a case of downloading them from a repo and dropping them into your config folder.

It seems that a plugin manager - lpm is being developed now and it has some really interesting features which really shows a different way of handling plugins for an application - much more like npm or even apt in style.

For example some of the commands for plugin management. Some items of interest are adding entire repositories much like 3rd party repos and PPAs in apt.

  lpm repo list                            List all extant repos.
  lpm [repo] add <repository remote>       Add a source repository.
    [...<repository remote>] 
  lpm [repo] rm <repository remote>        Remove a source repository.
    [...<repository remote>]
  lpm [repo] update [<repository remote>]  Update all/the specified repos.
    [...<repository remote>]        
  lpm [plugin] install                     Install specific plugins.
    <plugin name>[:<version>]              If installed, upgrades.
    [...<plugin name>:<version>]                     
  lpm [plugin] uninstall <plugin name>     Uninstall the specific plugin.
    [...<plugin name>]
  lpm [plugin] reinstall <plugin name>     Uninstall and installs the specific plugin.
    [...<plugin name>]
  lpm [plugin] list <repository remote>    List all/associated plugins.
    [...<repository remote>]    
  lpm [plugin] upgrade                     Upgrades all installed plugins 

But what makes it really interesting for me is how it can be used to manage the editor itself. It allows installation and management of multiple versions, allows you to "bottle" the config with a specific set of plugins and then allows that "bottle" config to be shared. Very much related to what was being discussed on Discord previously to allow "workspaces" or "Pulsar distributions".

  lpm [lite-xl] install <version>          Installs lite-xl. Infers the
    [binary] [datadir]                     paths on your system if not
                                           supplied. Automatically
                                           switches to be your system default
                                           if path auto inferred.
  lpm lite-xl add <version> <path>         Adds a local version of lite-xl to
                                           the managed list, allowing it to be
                                           easily bottled.
  lpm lite-xl remove <path>                Removes a local version of lite-xl
                                           from the managed list.
  lpm [lite-xl] switch <version> [<path>]  Sets the active version of lite-xl
                                           to be the specified version. Auto-detects
                                           current install of lite-xl; if none found
                                           path can be specifeid.
  lpm lite-xl list                         Lists all installed versions of
                                           lite-xl.
  lpm run <version> [...plugins]           Sets up a "bottle" to run the specified
                                           lite version, with the specified plugins
                                           and then opens it.
  lpm describe [bottle]                    Describes the bottle specified in the form
                                           of a list of commands, that allow someone
                                           else to run your configuration.

But yeah, not really a Pulsar specific topic but definitely opened my eyes to what could potentially be done.