Plugin Development Environment

For Rust plugins, Zellij provides an example plugin that also includes a development environment for plugin developers.

This development environment is created by the following Zellij layout (truncated here for clarity)

// plugin-development-workspace.kdl
layout {
    // ...
    pane edit="src/main.rs"
    pane edit="Cargo.toml"
    pane command="bash" { // could also be done with watchexec or something similar
        args "-c" "cargo build && zellij action start-or-reload-plugin file:target/wasm32-wasi/debug/rust-plugin-example.wasm"
    }
    pane {
        plugin location="file:target/wasm32-wasi/debug/rust-plugin-example.wasm"
    }
    // ...
}

Please check the example repository for the full version

This layout is intended to be loaded into Zellij (either in a running session or in a new session), to load the user's default $EDITOR to the main.rs and Cargo.toml files, show the rendered plugin in a separate pane as well as the compilation and plugin hot-reload logs.

Zellij plugins can of course be developed out of the terminal as well.

Building and testing on native targets

Since 0.45.0, the host functions the plugin API is built on are compiled only for wasm32 targets, with a no-op stub used elsewhere. Plugin crates can therefore be compiled, unit-tested and type-checked on the native target (eg. with cargo test) without a WebAssembly toolchain - keeping in mind that API calls do nothing there.