Install & run plugins (Plugin Manager)¶
Understand ships a large library of plugins and lets you add your own. Manage them all from the Plugin Manager.
Open the Plugin Manager¶
Tools → Plugin Manager (a project must be open). It lists every plugin Understand has found — shipped and user-installed — with its type and tags.
What you can do¶
| Action | Button | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Enable / Disable | Enable Plugin / Disable Plugin | Turn a plugin on or off. Enabled plugins appear in the relevant GUI menus (Graphs, Metrics, CodeCheck, Reports, Architectures). |
| Run | Run / Run in Background | Run the selected plugin now. |
| Customize | Customize | Make an editable copy of a shipped script in your per-user plugin folder so you can modify it. |
| Add Plugin | Add Plugin | Install a plugin from disk — a file picker filtered to *.upy / *.upl. |
| Rescan Plugins | Rescan Plugins | Re-read the plugin directories from disk (use after editing files by hand). Tools → Reload All Plugins does the same thing without opening this dialog. |
Install a plugin¶
Drag a .upy file onto the Understand main window. Understand recognizes it as a plugin and
offers Install (or Edit); Install copies it into the correct per-user plugin subfolder and
enables it.
In the Plugin Manager, click Add Plugin and pick the .upy from disk.
Drop the file into your per-user plugin directory (see the table below), then Rescan Plugins.
Where plugins live¶
The Plugin Manager reads two places: the plugins shipped with Understand, and your per-user
plugin directory, organized into a subfolder per type (Graph, Metric, Codecheck, IReport,
Arch):
| OS | Per-user plugin base |
|---|---|
| Windows | %APPDATA%\SciTools\plugin\<Type> (i.e. …\AppData\Roaming\SciTools\plugin\<Type>) |
| macOS | ~/Library/Application Support/SciTools/plugin/<Type> |
| Linux | ~/.config/SciTools/plugin/<Type> |
After editing a plugin's source
In the Plugin Manager (Tools → Plugin Manager) click Rescan Plugins to discard cached plugin information and reload from disk — your changes then take effect without restarting Understand.
Run a plugin¶
Once enabled, a plugin appears wherever its type belongs — a graph in the Graphs menu and an entity's Graphical Views, a metric in the Metrics Browser, a check in a CodeCheck configuration, a report in Reports, an architecture under automatic architectures. You can also Run it directly from the Plugin Manager.
If an installed plugin doesn't show up at all, it usually has a syntax or import error — see the plugin gotchas.
To write your own, see Write a plugin.