I’ve had a blast learning about Firefish Plugins over the past few weeks. The community has been wonderful and helping out when I get stuck. It’s time to give back a little and share what I’ve learned. I’ve put together a list of resources that I’ve found helpful and a few of my own notes. I hope the community finds it useful.

I’ve collected all of these materials into a Codeberg Repo for anyone to use as a reference. I hope to see contributions to the documentation as Firefish moves toward AiScript 13. Much of the documentation will need updating at that point.

Conclusions

In short, plugins provide an inventive way to allow users to extend the functionality of Calckey. The plugin system is still in its infancy, but it’s already quite powerful. I’m looking forward to seeing what the community comes up with.

Development can be frustrating. Debugging is difficult. The documentation is lacking. The community is small. But, the community is helpful and the end results are fun. I’m optimistic that the community will grow and the documentation will improve. I hope my contributions helped.

What’s next?

Firefish is considering a move to AiScript 0.13.13. This will bring a lot of changes to the plugin system, and any plugins that have been created already will have to be updated, since the syntax is completely different. Perhaps a migration tool or reference could be written to help with the transition.

I’ve already seen my work being used in the MFM artist community, and I know of many that have used the plugins I’ve built. I hope to see more development of plugins and more sharing of ideas. I know there are a few in my head that I haven’t had time to build yet. 😄

For myself, I’m going to take a bit of a break from plugins and focus on some other projects I’ve shelved recently. I’m sure an idea will spark for a plugin and I’ll be back at it again before you know it!

Other areas of interest

Firefish Pages intrigue me, but I’ve hit roadblocks there. The If blocks don’t see to work, your pages aren’t visible after saving them unless you bookmark the page URLs. I hope to see this feature mature and the bugs get worked out.

Posts

All my posts about Calckey.

• Firefish Plugins - Deep Dive
• Plugin - Highlighter
• Plugin - Add to Lists
• Custom CSS - Cursors
• Plugin - Share to Mastodon
• Plugin Generator - Snippets

Contributions

I’ve built a few open source repositories and sites to help with plugin development. I hope they are useful to the community.

• Plugin Documentation and Examples
• Snippets Plugin Generator
• Plugin Collections
• Snippets Plugin Generator Code