Proposal: plugin API

There are a ton of features being asked for that may or may not make it into Excalidraw:

• https://twitter.com/Vjeux/status/1310329936796762112
• #2184
• #2170
• #1718
• #1689

and probably many others. These are all good ideas but the core team is small and adding new features requires a lot of discretion so the app doesn’t lose its simplicity.

I wonder if we should consider introducing the notion of plugins. I was thinking they could work similar to a DAW workstation’s plugins, where we basically give them a rectangle that they can paint with whatever they want for the user interface, and we provide an API for them to modify the ExcalidrawElements. It would require a lot of thought and design up front but I think it would be really neat if we could enable an ecosystem of plugins developed by third parties. We could even take the best plugins and merge them into core if and where it makes sense and after it’s been proven to be valuable as a plugin.

If there’s any interest in this I’m happy to work on a spec.

[dai-shi]

@ReneCode Those two have different requirements. Claymate should be easier. It needs to add a new island and have access to some (exported?) functions.

[dai-shi]

Yeah, I’ve wanted such API that I can plugin excalidraw-animate and excalidraw-claymate.