Example Plugins

Two plugins ship with SwiftList itself and are useful, real-world references — both live in the Plugins/ folder of the SwiftList repo.

CoreExtensions — actions and the shell context menu

CoreExtensionsPlugin implements three interfaces at once: IPlugin, IActionProvider, and IConfigurable.

• IActionProvider.GetActions() returns ten built-in ISearchResultActions — open, locate in Explorer, copy path, copy/cut the file itself, open a command prompt at its location, touch/mkdir, and elevated (run-as-admin) variants of open and command-prompt.
• IActionProvider.GetDynamicActionProviders() returns a single IDynamicActionProvider — ShellMenuActionProvider — which is what makes the real Windows right-click menu (including nested cascade submenus like "Send to") appear inside SwiftList's own Actions menu. This is the pattern to copy if you want to surface any external, dynamically-built menu inside SwiftList rather than a fixed list of actions.
• IConfigurable.GetConfigSchema() demonstrates a config schema with nested field groups and a StringList field type — worth reading if your own plugin needs more than a flat list of booleans in its Settings → Plugins configuration dialog.
• FavoritesTabProvider and HistoryTabProvider each implement IStartupPanelTabProvider to surface their existing lists as tabs in the Startup Panel — a minimal reference for that interface, since both just wrap an already-queried list of items with no extra state of their own.

PinyinAlias — pinyin aliasing for Chinese filenames

PinyinAliasProvider implements both IAliasProvider and ITranslationProvider — a plugin can freely combine SDK roles when they're related, and this one is a good template for that:

• IAliasProvider.InputRanges/OutputRanges declare its two alphabets straight from PinyinEngine's own table bounds (InputRanges: the CJK block; OutputRanges: a-z) instead of duplicating magic numbers — the host uses these to support mixed literal+pinyin queries like 大cj against 大长今.
• IAliasProvider.CanHandle(text) scans for any Chinese character before doing any real work, so non-Chinese filenames skip alias generation entirely.
• IAliasProvider.GetAliases(text) builds a per-character syllable table (each Chinese character maps to its possible pinyin readings), then yields both a full-pinyin alias and an initials-only alias. For filenames with polyphonic characters (more than one valid reading), it generates aliases for every common combination — capped at 32 combinations to avoid a combinatorial blowup on pathological inputs — joining alternatives with | so the search engine treats each as a candidate rather than requiring all of them to match simultaneously.
• ITranslationProvider is implemented on the same class, purely to supply this plugin's own UI strings (e.g. its display name) via TranslationService.LoadEmbeddedTranslations — the two interfaces are unrelated in purpose but happen to live on one type here since it's a small, single-file plugin.
• A Dictionary<string, Dictionary<string, string>> cache guarded by a lock avoids re-parsing the embedded translation JSON on every call — the standard pattern for any plugin doing non-trivial work in GetTranslations.

Reading both plugins side by side is the fastest way to see how the pieces in the Plugin SDK Reference fit together in practice.