Writing new plugins

Writing new plugins is fairly easy, but may not be necessary for your application (see the configuration summary or the main configuration documentation). If you do need to write a plugin, read on, but first a bit of background.

Background

Smash is built on top of IPython and is in fact itself an IPython extension. Smash plugins are essentially ipython extensions which require smash, but it can be useful to differentiate the terminology. Before going much further it's probably a good idea to check out the existing IPython docs on writing extensions.

Resources for reference

If you want to do simple stuff like just writing new commands/macros/magic then a tutorials for writing IPython magic will probably be all you need.

• If you want to get your hooks into smash-specific events like "directory change" or "virtual environment deactived" then read this documentation about the smash event system.

• For an example of writing new tab-completion stuff, check out the code for the fabric completer.

• For an example of input preprocessing see the code for the currency converter.

• For an example of all-else-fails input processing (meaning input was neither bash nor python) see the code for the do-what-i-mean plugin