Plugin host

Clipwell's typed-item and action systems are plugin seams. The public core ships the contracts and built-ins; anything bespoke (personal workflow integrations) loads from an external assembly at runtime — no core changes, no recompile.

The two contracts

Both live in Clipwell.Protocol.Plugins:

• IClipDetector — Detect(ClipItem) → kind?. Returns a custom kind string or null. Runs in the daemon, which classifies items at read time.
• IClipAction — AppliesTo(item) + ExecuteAsync(item, IClipActionContext). Shown in the picker's Ctrl+K palette and run in the UI. The context (OpenUrl / OpenPath / SetClipboardAsync / Notify) keeps actions free of any UI dependency, so the same action works in-core or from a plugin.

Loading model

The key wrinkle: detectors and actions run in different processes. Clipwell is a headless daemon plus a thin picker, so the plugin host has two halves that scan the same folder:

plugins/                      ┌─ daemon  → PluginLoader.Load<IClipDetector>()
  my-plugin.dll  ─────────────┤
                              └─ picker  → PluginLoader.Load<IClipAction>()

PluginLoader.Load<T>(dir) (in Clipwell.Protocol.Plugins) Assembly.LoadFroms every *.dll in the folder and instantiates each public, concrete T with a parameterless constructor. A plugin that throws on load is skipped — never fatal.

Plugins resolve from <data dir>/plugins (override with CLIPWELL_PLUGINS_DIR).

Type identity

A plugin references Clipwell.Protocol with Private="false" so it ships as a single DLL and binds to the host's already-loaded Clipwell.Protocol. Shipping a second copy of the protocol assembly would give the plugin's IClipDetector a different type identity than the host's, and it wouldn't match — so the build is deliberately set up to exclude it.

Public vs. private

This split is what lets the public repo stay generic. Built-in detectors (url/email/color/path/code/image, plus github-pr/jira) and actions (open in browser, open path, copy, copy domain) ship in the core. Personal features — Claude-session detection and actions, Jira/GitHub integrations, terminal/repo helpers — live in a separate private plugin that loads through these same contracts, with no hardcoded paths in the public tree. See plugins/sample for a minimal working example.