mandara

Plugins

Everything in Mandara is a plugin: every bar item, panel and sidebar card. Studio keeps the two kinds apart: Mandara plugins are first-party, bundled and updated with the shell; third-party plugins come from the marketplace, your own folders or your distribution, and run sandboxed.

Studio → Plugins is a store: Discover opens on a featured hero over the plugins’ cover art and curated shelves (Essentials, For your desk, Productivity, Media & capture, System tools, New & updated, Community picks), with one search and filter chips; every card has a one-click Get / On button. Each plugin has a product page with its art, what it may access, its settings and where it fits. Installed, Updates, Community (the GitHub marketplace) and Develop (the authoring handbook) sit beside it.

Home Assistant and Phone Connect keep their data cached while enabled; Feeds keeps only unread counts and loads its history while its panel is open. Reddit keeps posts and comments only while its panel is open and for a minute and a half after it closes; its pictures go as soon as it closes. Switching one off clears its snapshots, and a late refresh cannot restore them. Article read history stays on disk. An explicit home or device action already running can finish; disabling the plugin prevents a follow-up refresh.

Discover: the desktop widget plugins and their painted covers

Product page: art, more like this, permissions and settings

The 81 first-party plugins (45 of them ship switched off, marked opt-in):

Plugin	What it does
Session	Power and session menu
Launcher	Application launcher (Super+Space)
Workspaces	Tags / workspaces with their apps
Active window	Focused window title
Clock	Time, date and calendar
Keyboard layout	The active keyboard layout; click to switch
Language	Switch the interface language instantly
Media	MPRIS now playing and controls
Prayer times	Islamic daily prayer times and countdown (opt-in)
Jannah	A gentle daily reminder of Jannah: verses of the Qur’an and hadith from Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, their meaning in your language, and one good step for today, in the bar, the sidebar or on the desktop (opt-in)
Qur’an	Read the whole Qur’an with its meaning in your language and listen to it recited ayah by ayah, keep your place, your bookmarks and your khatm; the text downloads only once you turn it on (opt-in)
Hadith	A library of the hadith collections (Bukhari and Muslim, and the Sunan when you want them) with grades, a hadith of the day, search and bookmarks; collections download only once you turn it on (opt-in)
Resources	CPU, memory and disk usage
Mini stats	CPU, memory, network, temperature and battery as compact numbers in the bar (opt-in)
Process hunter	Find running processes by name or PID and end them	(opt-in)
Drives	Mounted filesystems and removable drives: mount, unlock and safely remove	(opt-in)
Containers	Docker and Podman containers: status, live usage, logs and controls	(opt-in)
Services	systemd units: failed alerts, start, stop, enable and journal	(opt-in)
Power	Power profiles, battery health and charge history
Updates	Pending package updates from pacman, the AUR, APT, DNF, Zypper and Flatpak	(opt-in)
Network	Wi-Fi and wired connectivity
Bluetooth	Bluetooth devices
Audio	Output/input selection, volume and microphone
Quick settings	Toggles for the sidebar
Screenshot	Region, window and screen capture, and screen recording (GPU Screen Recorder, wf-recorder or the built-in AV1 encoder) with pause, sound and recent recordings
Clipboard	Clipboard history sorted by kind, with collections
Main menu	Right-click empty bar space
Notifications	Notification center with history and do-not-disturb
Privacy	Shows when apps use your microphone, camera or screen	(opt-in)
To-do	Tasks grouped into lists, for the sidebar and bar	(opt-in)
Notes	Markdown notes in topics, saved as .md files	(opt-in)
Pomodoro	Focus timer with breaks and session tracking	(opt-in)
Sudoku	The number puzzle at four levels, with notes, highlights, hints, undo and a timer, in the bar and on the desktop (opt-in)
2048	Slide and merge tiles to 2048 on a 3 × 3 to 6 × 6 board, with smooth tiles, best scores and undo, in the bar and on the desktop (opt-in)
Weather	Animated current conditions, hourly and 5-day forecast
Wallpaper	Wallpaper picker and desktop background
Wallpaper depth	Draws the wallpaper’s subject over the desktop clock and widgets: hand-tuned, or with a small depth model downloaded on demand (core)
Wallhaven	Search and download wallpapers from wallhaven.cc right in the wallpaper picker (opt-in)
Wallpaper generator	Procedural wallpapers and seamless AV1 video loops at any size up to 8K: twelve styles, every variable adjustable, on a schedule if you want (opt-in)
System tray	Status icons and menus of background apps
World clock	Cities around the world with daylight and a meeting planner	(opt-in)
Network speed	Live upload and download rates, public IP and a speed test	(opt-in)
Color picker	Pick colors from the screen, with formats, tonal ramps and contrast	(opt-in)
Authenticator	Two-factor codes (TOTP / HOTP) stored in your keyring	(opt-in)
Soundscapes	Ambient sea, rain, wind, café, fire and noise — synthesized live	(opt-in)
Radio	Internet radio: curated stations by genre, your own stations and favourites, with live now-playing (opt-in)
Dock	A macOS-style dock: pinned, running and recent apps, stacks and the Trash, with magnification and auto-hide (opt-in)
App installer	Install apps by dropping AppImages, Flatpaks, archives or packages on the dock or Studio	(opt-in)
Screen time	How long you spend in each app, per day, with limits (opt-in)
Cursor themes	Install, preview and apply cursor themes, live, with size and hiding options (opt-in)
Shortcuts cheatsheet	Every keyboard shortcut, Mandara’s and your compositor’s, in one searchable sheet (mandara msg keybinds toggle) (opt-in)
Task progress	A bar ring that scripts, long builds and AI agents report progress to (mandara msg progress set build 40%) (opt-in)
Eye breaks	Gentle 20-20-20 reminders that count only active time and wait while a fullscreen app has focus (opt-in)
Presentation mode	One switch for talks and screen sharing: do not disturb, keep awake and hidden desktop widgets, all put back afterwards (opt-in)
Translator	Translate text with DeepL or your own LibreTranslate server; text is sent only when you ask (opt-in)
Phone Connect	Paired KDE Connect devices: battery, ring, ping and explicitly send clipboard text (opt-in)
Feeds	A reader for RSS, Atom and JSON feeds: one timeline, folders, saved articles, search, a clean reader view, starter feeds and OPML, and a sidebar card with your newest unread articles (opt-in)
Reddit	Browse your communities, posts and comment threads in a panel (cards, compact or grid) and a sidebar card: limited mode on Reddit’s public feeds out of the box, full mode with your own installed-app client id; NSFW hidden and spoilers covered by default (opt-in)
Home Assistant	Your real home states and favourites, with controls for lights, switches, fans, scenes, scripts and buttons (opt-in)
Share to phone	Clipboard text, a screenshot or a file, served once on your network behind a QR code (opt-in)
Tailscale	Your tailnet: this device, peers, direct or relayed paths, exit nodes, connect and disconnect (opt-in)
Uptime monitor	Watches your sites and services (HTTP or TCP) and tells you when one goes down (opt-in)
Local AI	Ollama models in memory and on disk: GPU memory, unload timers, load and unload (opt-in)
Listening ports	Which apps listen on which ports, who can reach them, open in the browser or end them (opt-in)
Git repositories	Your local repositories: branch, uncommitted changes and unpushed commits, with a terminal a click away (opt-in)
CI status	GitHub Actions runs of your repositories, with a notification when a run finishes (opt-in)
Crash reports	Apps that crashed this week (systemd-coredump), with the report and a debugger a click away (opt-in)
Desktop clocks	Hero clocks on the desktop: analog and cookie dials, stacked cards, dot matrix, digit boxes, a slanted HUD, your own text lines, orbits, day and year progress, and the depth clock
System monitor	Live readings on the desktop as a column with graphs, ring or wavy gauges, segmented meters, tall bars or thermal arcs
Desktop decorations	Text and shapes on the desktop: lines of type, vertical poems, discs, stripes, waves and frames
Desktop visualizers	Audio visualizers on the desktop (bars, a mirrored strip, a wave, a ring or an LED meter), even behind the wallpaper’s subject
Now playing card	Album art, progress and synced lyrics on the desktop while music plays, plus a turning record, a pocket player, a shaped or halftone cover, a side pill and lyrics
Calendar card	This month on the desktop, with your events, plus a painted month, a week strip, what’s coming up and a date tile
Desktop weather	The weather and the days ahead on the desktop, a sentence about the sky, a disc and an hourly curve
Desktop world clock	The time in other cities on the desktop
Countdown	Days until (or since) a date, on the desktop
Desktop productivity	Your to-dos, a sticky note, the focus timer, a quote and notebook tabs on the desktop; tick tasks and run the timer right there
Desktop sky	The sun’s arc from sunrise to sunset, tonight’s moon and a globe lit where the sun is now
Desktop shortcuts and you	A profile card, launch tiles for apps, folders and links, quick toggles, volume and brightness sliders and your theme’s palette
Desktop fun	A little cat, soap bubbles, a photo frame and stickers on the desktop
Desktop info	A machine card, screen time, the next prayer, a search field, an “at a glance” line, your GitHub year, exchange rates, AI usage and your Steam games (the online ones fetch only once you switch that on)

See Connected plugins for setup, API keys and privacy.

The desktop widget plugins draw nothing until you place one of their widgets (Studio → Desktop widgets, or right-click the desktop → Add widget); switching one off hides its widgets until you switch it back on. Each has its own logo and a painted store cover; screenshots of the widgets themselves are in Your desktop.

Sidebar cards come from Quick settings, Weather, Notifications, Media, Audio, Resources, To-do, Notes, Pomodoro, Prayer times, Jannah, the Qur’an, Hadith, Radio, Feeds, Reddit, Sudoku and 2048 (and any third-party plugin). Every one of them is in Studio → Bars → Sidebar → Tabs → Add a widget, under Add to sidebar on its page in Studio → Plugins, and in mandara msg sidebar tab widget add <tab> <id>. Placing a card switches its plugin on; switching a plugin off hides its card, which stays on its tab and comes back when you switch the plugin on again. Switching a plugin on by itself doesn’t add its card to a tab, so you choose where it goes.

Every Mandara plugin can be switched off, which stops everything it runs (bar item, sidebar card, launcher entries and any background polling), or removed: taken out of the bar and sidebar and parked under Studio → Plugins → Removed Mandara plugins until you restore it to where it was (mandara msg plugins disable|enable|remove|restore <id>). The launcher, session menu, main menu and wallpaper depth are core and stay on (the depth effect itself has its own switch in Studio → Wallpaper).

Mandara is composable, not minimal: a fresh install turns on a calm, complete desktop (workspaces, active window, clock, keyboard layout and language, network, Bluetooth, audio, tray, notifications, power, resources, quick settings, media, weather, wallpaper, screenshot and clipboard, plus the core launcher, session and main menus) and everything else ships switched off: the dock, mini stats, screen time, prayer times, the wallpaper generator, Wallhaven, cursor themes, containers, services, drives, updates, the process hunter, the authenticator, soundscapes, the radio, world clock, network speed, the color picker, Pomodoro, notes, to-do, privacy, the app installer, the shortcuts cheatsheet, task progress, eye breaks, presentation mode, share to phone, Tailscale, the uptime monitor, local AI, listening ports, Git repositories, CI status, crash reports, Reddit, Sudoku, 2048, Jannah, the Qur’an and Hadith. Turn any of them on in Studio → Plugins or with mandara msg plugins enable <id>. Upgrading from 0.1 changes nothing you had: a config written before these defaults keeps every plugin it had on (the upgrade writes them into [plugins] enabled), Wallhaven stays on if it was, and cursor themes stay on if you had picked a cursor.

Games: Sudoku and 2048

Two opt-in games (Studio → Plugins, mandara msg plugins enable sudoku / 2048, or type sudoku, 2048, games or puzzle in the launcher and pick Turn on). Each has a bar item with a drop-down panel (put it in a bar group from its page in Studio → Plugins), a playable sidebar card (Studio → Bars → Sidebar, or mandara msg sidebar tab widget add Overview sudoku) and a desktop widget (Studio → Desktop widgets → Add, or right-click the desktop → Add widget) that you play right on the desktop: click the board to give it the keyboard, click a window or the desktop to give it back, and Escape lets go too. One game is shared by the panel, the sidebar card and the widget, on every display.

• Sudoku deals a puzzle with exactly one solution at Easy, Medium, Hard or Expert. Levels follow the techniques a puzzle needs: Easy needs only singles, Medium also pointing and claiming, Hard pairs and triples, Expert more than that. The same seed always deals the same puzzle (mandara msg sudoku new hard 42). Arrows move, 1–9 write, Shift+digit or N switches to pencil marks, Backspace erases, H gives a hint, Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y undo and redo; the mouse and touch work with the number pad and tools under the board. The timer counts only while the panel is open, or while you play on the widget or the sidebar card (it stops after a minute and a half without a key or click there, or when the widget lets go of the keyboard). Settings: level, highlights (row, column and box; the same digit), conflicts, the mistake counter, timer, hints, clearing notes automatically, the accent colour and the time in the bar.
• 2048 slides with the arrows or WASD, a mouse drag or a finger swipe; U or Ctrl+Z takes back one move. Tiles glide and pop on the shell’s springs only while they move (they jump with reduced motion or Animations off). Reach 2048 to win, then keep going or start again. Settings: board size (3–6, used for the next game), animations, undo, the accent colour and the score in the bar.

Both keep the game in progress (with Sudoku’s notes and undo history), your best times, scores and statistics in ~/.local/state/mandara/games/, written a moment after you play, never on every move. A file that can’t be read is moved aside as *.corrupt and the game starts fresh. Nothing runs while neither game is on screen; the widgets use the cards’ small surfaces and draw only when something changes. mandara msg sudoku status|new|select|digit|note|erase|hint|undo|redo and mandara msg 2048 status|new|move|undo|continue play them from a script.

Jannah, Qur’an, Hadith and Prayer times

These four opt-in plugins share these things (the last two are for Jannah, the Qur’an and Hadith):

• Their own language. Each has a Language setting in Studio → Plugins (language: Follow Mandara, or one of Mandara’s twenty languages; mandara msg <jannah|quran|hadith|prayer> language ar). Its panel, bar item, sidebar card and desktop widgets, the meanings and prayer names it shows, and its reading direction (Arabic reads right to left) follow it, while the rest of the shell keeps its own. A meaning missing in that language downloads the way it always does (the Qur’an’s translation, a hadith collection’s meaning); what was downloaded for another language stays.
• A peek. Previous / Next under today’s item shows another one without marking anything: the coming days’ Jannah steps (only today’s step can be marked done), the Qur’an’s ayah of the day and the ayahs after your place (your place and khatm don’t move), Hadith’s coming hadith (nothing is marked read), and Prayer times’ other days. Back to today returns; a peek is forgotten when the shell restarts. From the command line: jannah step peek, quran peek, hadith peek, prayer peek.
• A fresh Jannah reminder every time you open it. Each time the Jannah panel or the sidebar opens, it shows a verse or hadith picked at random from the ones you chose (Studio → Plugins → Jannah → Reminders from); a panel and a sidebar card open together show the same one. Next on the reminder shows another fresh one, and Previous goes back through the ones you saw (jannah next, jannah prev; jannah peek looks at another without changing it, jannah peek -1 at the one before). The reminder shows its own number among the ones it is drawn from, such as #104 of 230: the same verse or hadith always has the same number (jannah today reports it as number and of). The desktop widgets keep theirs for the day (or the hour, with New reminder). Today’s step stays one step a day.
• Nothing you just read comes straight back. Next never shows the item you were on. A fresh Jannah reminder is never one of the last 16 you saw (a third of the items for a very small choice; two items simply alternate, one stays), and Jannah remembers them in ~/.local/state/mandara/jannah-recent.json, so a restart doesn’t bring them back either. Its desktop widgets, which skip items too long for them, avoid those too. Hadith’s rotation walks every hadith once per round in a shuffled order, and a new round never starts with any of the previous round’s last eight. The Jannah and Hadith readers stop at either end of a list instead of wrapping round.
• Every word, one click away. The sidebar cards, the Hadith panel’s hadith of the day and Jannah’s step evidence fold long text to a few lines, ending after a whole word (never inside one, never between a letter and its vowel marks). Read more, or a click on the text, unfolds the card in place, and Show less folds it back; both work from the keyboard (Tab, then Enter or Space). Open in the reader opens the item itself, with a hadith’s chain and grades. On the desktop, a widget that had to shorten its item says Read more, and a click opens that item in its plugin’s reader (mandara msg desktop widgets press <widget> read:<jannah|quran|hadith>:<ref> does the same).

Copy a complete card. In Qur’an, Hadith and Jannah, the Image button beside text copy puts the current entry on the clipboard as a PNG, using its colours, ornaments and configured fonts. It includes every word, the reference, and any meaning or chain currently shown, even when you have to scroll to read it in the panel. Text copy remains a separate action. The success message appears only after the clipboard accepts the image; oversized entries report an error instead of being cropped. Closing the panel cancels unfinished preparation.

The same action is available as quran copy-image 2:255, hadith copy-image bukhari 1 and jannah copy-image 89:30. These explicit references export the entry using the plugin’s reading settings; the Qur’an command includes its meaning in Study mode. No screenshot or other desktop content is copied. Qur’an recitation. Studio → Plugins → Qur’an → Reciter includes Yasser Al-Dossary, Abdulrashid Sufi and Abdul Basit Abdul Samad. All three recordings use Hafs from Asim, matching the reader’s text. Yasser is the default; a saved Alafasy or Al-Ajamy choice falls back to Yasser without rewriting your settings. The other available choices stay as you selected them.

Yasser’s and Abdul Basit’s ayahs come from EveryAyah, using its 128 kbit/s Yasser and 192 kbit/s Abdul Basit Murattal recordings. Sufi uses MP3Quran’s Hafs recording and official ayah timings: the whole surah downloads before its first ayah plays, with progress in the panel. A long surah takes more disk space and time to download than one ayah. Pause or stop cancels an unfinished download; completed files stay available offline. Chapters decode one packet at a time, and moving to the next ayah reuses the open chapter. Offline playback needs both the recording and its timing table. Remove removes the text, meanings and cached recitations as before.

The adhan. Prayer times can play the call to prayer at each of the five prayers (Studio → Plugins → Prayer times → Adhan at prayer times, off by default). Nothing ships with Mandara: turning it on downloads the recording once into ~/.local/share/mandara/prayer/adhan/ (about 1.8 MB, with progress and Try again); turning it off keeps it, and Remove (mandara msg prayer adhan remove) deletes it. It plays on its own stream at the system volume, once per prayer and only on time (a prayer missed while the computer slept is never played late), stays silent during do not disturb and presentation mode, and stops from its notification, the panel or mandara msg prayer adhan stop. The recording is “Beautiful adhan” by Adam-synagda, released into the public domain (CC0 1.0) on Wikimedia Commons, fetched as Commons’ MP3 rendering; the same recording plays at Fajr.

Radio

The Radio plugin (opt-in) plays internet radio in pure Rust: MP3, AAC and Ogg Vorbis streams, .pls and .m3u playlists and redirects, with the song title the station sends (ICY metadata). It plays to your sound server as “Mandara Radio” and offers itself to media keys, the media panel and other apps’ controls (MPRIS), so the media island and the lock screen show what plays.

• Stations. It ships about seventy stations on thirteen shelves (News, Talk, Pop, Rock, Jazz, Classical, Electronic, Lo-fi & chill, Ambient, World, Arabic, Qur’an recitation and Kids). Every one is a public, free stream, and each was checked to connect and play on the date in the source (mandara-services/src/radio/station.rs). Search them by name, shelf, country or language, tap the heart to keep favourites (reorder them with Reorder), and add your own by address in the Add tab: Mandara listens for a moment first, so a station that wouldn’t play is never saved.
• The panel. A large now-playing card (the station’s art, a live badge, the title, format, bitrate and buffer health, and a level meter), previous / play / next, a favourite button, a sleep timer that fades the sound out, and the volume slider in your chosen slider design.
• The bar shows the station’s art, a live dot and the title, which scrolls only when it doesn’t fit and stays still with reduced motion. Right-click it to play or pause.
• The sidebar card is a compact player: the station’s art, what plays with a live dot, a favourite heart, previous / play / next through your favourites and the volume in your slider design. Put it on any sidebar tab in Studio → Bars → Sidebar → Tabs (or mandara msg sidebar tab …).
• The directory (off until you switch it on) searches radio-browser.info from the Stations tab. Nothing is sent until you press its search button; results are kept for ten minutes, then forgotten.
• When it drops. A stream that drops reconnects on its own, waiting a little longer each time, up to the number of tries you set; a wrong address or an unsupported stream says why instead of retrying.
• Resources. Nothing runs until you press play. While a station plays, two threads stream and decode it through a buffer of a few seconds (sized from the station’s bitrate, so it never grows); pausing or stopping ends them and frees the buffer. HLS (.m3u8) and Opus streams aren’t supported yet.

Its settings (Studio → Plugins → Radio) cover the usual station and resuming at login, volume per station, reconnecting and the buffer, the sleep timer’s length, notifications when the song changes, media keys, the bar item’s style, the scrolling title’s speed and width, the station art’s colours, the level meter and stream details, which shelves appear, and the directory. Your favourites and stations live in ~/.local/state/mandara/radio.toml. Commands: mandara msg radio … (commands).

Wallpaper depth

The depth clock’s subject (the part of your wallpaper drawn over the clock and the widgets behind it) comes from the core Wallpaper depth plugin, in one of two modes (Studio → Wallpaper → Depth clock, or [wallpaper.depth] mode):

• Hand-tuned (the default): Mandara’s own sky / subject finder, pure Rust, no download. It is conservative and skips wallpapers it isn’t sure about.
• Model: Depth Anything V2 Small (Apache-2.0), a 27 MB quantized ONNX file run by the pure-Rust tract engine. It is downloaded once, checksum-verified, into ~/.local/share/mandara/models/ when you pick this mode (or press Download, or run mandara msg depth download); the binary never ships it. It orders the whole picture from far to near, so it also lets you choose how deep the clock sits: automatically per wallpaper (where the far backdrop ends), or with the Clock depth slider.

Picking one turns the other off. A mask you make yourself (~/.local/share/mandara/depth_masks/<wallpaper name>.png) wins over both. Place the clock (mandara msg depth place-clock) moves the clock to where the subject rises into its digits.

The model never runs inside the shell. For each new wallpaper the shell starts a short-lived helper (mandara depth-worker) at idle priority (SCHED_IDLE, nice 19), single-threaded, with a 1 GiB data cap, a 45 s CPU budget for the model run, a 60 s CPU cap and a 5-minute wall-clock limit (at idle priority a busy machine only stretches the run); it runs once on a 518 × 518 downscale, writes a small depth map to ~/.cache/mandara/depth_masks/ and exits, so its memory goes back to the system at once. Masks and depth maps are reused until the wallpaper file changes; nothing runs at idle and nothing polls. Measurements are in performance.

The plugin system

• Written in Rust, run as WebAssembly. Third-party plugins compile to a WebAssembly component (wasm32-wasip2) against a small WIT contract and run inside wasmtime.
• Sandboxed. No files, no network, no environment and no subprocesses. Each call has a time budget (100 ms, 1 s for init), a plugin can’t block or sleep, its memory is capped at 64 MiB and its views are capped in size. A plugin that traps or crosses a limit is switched off; the shell keeps running.
• Native look for free. A plugin returns a declarative view tree (rows, columns, cards, text, icons, buttons, meters) and Mandara draws it with the current theme in every palette, light or dark, right to left in Arabic.
• Settings and permissions. A plugin declares its settings in plugin.toml, and Studio builds its settings modal from them. The only permission, commands, lets it use Mandara’s interface (open panels, control media and volume, post notifications, add notes and to-dos), never commands that run programs or change settings; Studio shows it in the plugin’s detail modal.
• Live. Drop a folder in, rebuild, edit a translation or delete it, and Mandara reloads it within about half a second.
• Translated. Plugins ship their own locale files; the shell picks the right language and translates their views.

Shipping a plugin

There are two ways to get a plugin to people.

1. The marketplace (GitHub). There is no account, server or review queue:

1. Put the plugin in a public GitHub repository.
2. Add the repository topic mandara-plugin (repository → About → ⚙ → Topics). That topic is the only thing the marketplace searches for.
3. Publish a release with one asset named <id>.mandara.tar.gz: a folder holding plugin.toml, plugin.wasm and, optionally, locales/, icon.png and cover.png.

If the store policy permits it, your plugin is listed in Studio → Plugins → Community (and Discover’s Community picks), ranked by stars, as soon as GitHub’s search picks up the topic. One click installs it, switches it on and loads it live; updating and removing are one click too. Forks and pre-release-only repositories count, and the archive may hold the plugin folder or just its files. Archives are checked before anything is unpacked: they must match the release’s SHA256SUMS when it publishes one, with no paths outside the plugin folder, no links or device files, at most 64 MB, and the id comes from plugin.toml. A plugin stays with the repository it came from: if that repository is renamed or handed to another owner, Mandara won’t follow it. Every release then passes a compliance check in the sandbox (well under a second): a broken, malicious or placeholder one doesn’t install, and Studio marks that version with the reason while still letting you install it anyway. Run it before you publish with mandara msg plugins vet <dir> (PLUGINS.md).

Community listings also follow the maintained store policy. Rules can hide an account’s plugins or one repository, and can block new installs and updates. These rules update independently of Mandara releases. They also apply to direct repository installs and cached update plans; Install anyway only overrides a release’s compliance warning. Installed plugins keep running, and built-in plugins and local folders are unaffected.

The policy is checked on community browsing and before installs and updates, with up to a minute of caching and no background polling. If verification fails, Mandara keeps its last valid rules; after 24 hours without verification, installs and updates pause. The same limits apply when another process holds the refresh lock too long; using the cache does not renew its verification time. If it has never loaded a valid policy, community browsing pauses too. An empty policy is valid and allows all repositories. See Store moderation for the format and cache behavior.

2. A local folder. Copy the plugin folder onto the machine:

Folder	For	Starts
~/.local/share/mandara/plugins-dev/<id>/	plugins you are writing	enabled
~/.local/share/mandara/plugins/<id>/	plugins you install by hand (and marketplace installs)	off until you enable it
/usr/share/mandara/plugins/<id>/ (any $XDG_DATA_DIRS)	distribution packages	off until you enable it

It appears in Studio → Plugins within a second, no restart needed. Studio → Plugins → Develop shows these folders resolved on your system, the format and contract of your build, and a Validate list explaining exactly why a plugin didn’t load.

→ The plugin guide: quick start, the WIT API, views, settings, translations and a GitHub Actions release workflow.

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