Using plugins¶

Plugins extend Cascade with extra commands and features, such as coloring nicknames or reacting to events. They're small standalone programs that Cascade discovers automatically; there's no app store or manual "add" step.

Installing a plugin¶

Cascade discovers plugins from two places:

~/.cascade-chat/plugins/ — drop the plugin's executable (or a folder containing it) here.
Your PATH — any executable named cascade-* is picked up automatically.

Naming

Plugins are identified by the cascade- prefix. A program called cascade-nickname-colors shows up as the nickname-colors plugin.

New plugins are discovered when Cascade starts. You can also re-scan without restarting from the Plugins settings (see below).

Managing plugins¶

Open Settings → Plugins. Each discovered plugin shows its name, version, author, description, and the path it was loaded from, with these controls:

Control	What it does
Enable / Disable	Turns the plugin on or off. The state is remembered between launches.
Reload	Hot-reloads a running plugin without restarting Cascade. Shown only while enabled.
Configure	Opens an inline settings form. Shown only for plugins that declare configurable options.

A status badge next to each plugin shows whether it's currently Enabled or Disabled.

What a plugin can do¶

Once enabled, a plugin can:

Add commands that appear in the /help dialog under a Plugin category and run like any other slash command.
Decorate the UI, for example by supplying colors or labels for nicknames.
React to events such as connecting, messages, and joins, handled in the background.

Enable/disable is global

A plugin is on or off for the whole app. There's no per-channel or per-network toggle.

Writing your own¶

Plugins talk to Cascade over JSON-RPC and can be written in any language. See the plugin system developer reference for the protocol, lifecycle, and examples.