Introduction
Pragtical has little functionalities without plugins — anything that can be implemented as plugins can and will be implemented as one.
Pragtical is mostly written in Lua. If you want to write plugins, you need to know how to write Lua. There are various resources such as the Lua 5.4 Reference Manual, Programming in Lua, Learn Lua in 15 Minutes, Lua Tutorial at TutorialsPoint and Lua Tutorial at lua-users.org.
You will also need general programming knowledge and some experience with object-oriented programming.
Overview
Pragtical is a fork of lite. As such, a lot of concepts used in lite is inherited in Pragtical. Lite: An Implementation Overview is an excellent article that explains many concepts about lite.
Types of plugins
There are a few types of plugins.
Syntaxes and colors are considered as subset of plugins.
These subsets of plugins only interact with the syntax highlighter
and the style table respectively.
Tips and tricks
Here are some tips for plugin developers.
Interactive debugging
Other than using GDB to debug the C part of Pragtical,
you can also debug the Lua part with lite-debugger.
To use the debugger, install it as a plugin and call
command.perform "debugger:break" to stop the VM and
start debugging interactively.
Differing stack traces on a critical error
On an older version of Pragtical, the stack trace printed on the terminal
when a critical error occur may differ with the stack trace printed
in error.txt.
In this case, the stack trace in error.txt is more complete and
should be referred.
This is a bug and will be fixed in future versions of Pragtical.
print() function many not work in Windows
On Windows, we compile Pragtical using the GUI subsystem by default. This causes Pragtical to close the stdout. To work around this behavior, you can force Pragtical to keep stdout open by redirecting its output in a terminal.
On PowerShell:
./pragtical | tee -variable null
On cmd.exe:
./pragtical > NUL