Plugins

esc bundles only a small number of built-in operations so you can decide what operations will be useful to you and avoid staring all day at operations you never use. Any remaining operations you need can be added via plugins.

Plugin location

Plugins are Python modules (.py files) stored in the plugins subdirectory of your esc configuration directory. By default your esc configuration directory is ~/.esc, where ~ represents your home or user directory. If this directory doesn’t exist but $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/esc (or ~/.config/esc if that environment variable is unset) does, that is used instead. (See here for why you might want to use the XDG folders specification.)

Installing plugins

To install a plugin, you simply copy its .py file into your plugins directory (see Plugin location). You can create the .esc and/or plugins directories if they don’t exist. The next time you start esc, the plugins will be loaded.

Warning

esc plugins can execute arbitrary Python code on your computer, which could include malicious code, so you should not install esc plugins from sources that you do not trust.

Tip

Plugins are loaded and their operations placed in the Commands window in alphabetical order by their filename. To control the order, you can prefix their filenames with numbers, e.g., 01_trig.py, 02_log.py.

Finding plugins

You can write your own plugins (see the Developer Manual) or get plugins from someone else. Some plugins providing common features like trig and log functions are available for download in the esc repository under esc-plugins.