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Open Choice

Your First Plugin

The best plugin to start with is Toy Calculator — a minimal plugin that ships with Open Choice for testing. It performs arithmetic and produces a result file. There is no external runtime to install and nothing that can go wrong at the system level.

Installing from the registry

  1. Open the Browse Plugins panel from Plugins → Browse Registry in the menu bar
  2. Find Toy Calculator in the list and click Install
  3. Review the install dialog (see below) and click Confirm

If the registry is not reachable, you can install the plugin without it:

  • Plugins → Install from File… — select a .ocplugin file you downloaded manually from the releases page, or
  • Plugins → Install from URL… — paste a direct HTTPS link to a .ocplugin file.

The same verification pipeline runs regardless of source.

The install dialog

Before any plugin is installed, Open Choice shows you what you are agreeing to:

Publisher and signature — Whether the plugin is signed by a trusted publisher. Toy Calculator is signed by Open Choice directly and shows Verified.

Risk profile — A summary of how much access the plugin needs. Toy Calculator is safe — it only writes to its own working directory.

Lifecycle — A stability badge telling you what to expect from the plugin’s interface going forward. Every bundled plugin currently declares experimental. See Plugin Lifecycle for what each stage means.

Capabilities — The specific permissions declared in the plugin manifest:

  • Filesystem read — what directories the plugin can read
  • Filesystem write — what directories it can write to
  • Network — whether it makes network requests

Review these before confirming. See Understanding Trust for a full explanation of what each level means.

After installation

Once installed, Toy Calculator appears in the Plugins panel with a green status indicator and trust_status: verified.

Click on the plugin name to open its detail page. From here you can:

  • Read the plugin description and version
  • Open the Help Explorer panel to browse its commands and examples
  • Run a self-test to verify it is working correctly

Continue to Your First Task File to run a calculation.