Visidata: [wishlist] add notification for useful plugins

[anjakefala]

The VisiData ecosystem is growing, and it would be useful to have ways to teach people about it through the terminal.

@tsibley proposed in https://github.com/saulpw/visidata/pull/445:

Would you be receptive to helping folks discover plugins via status line suggestions?
e.g. "Install the vds3 plugin to read s3:// URLs."

I'm thinking of situations like the one I ran into, where someone runs vd s3://foo/bar.csv and finds it doesn't work. If VisiData had prompted me to check out the plugin (instead of throwing a KeyError), that would have been really slick. I'd be willing to implement this, if you're receptive.

Additionally, educational messages can be added to the motd.

[saulpw]

I love the idea of adding a default openurl_s3 that refers users to the vds3 plugin. Maybe we can find a good way to make it updateable apart from actual vd releases. Like if there were a provides column in plugins.tsv that had openurl_s3 in this case, and then vd created a stub for each of those that weren't already available.

[ajkerrigan]

That seems like a neat idea - so when checking for loaders, VisiData could do a fallback check for plugin recommendations based on that provides column before "really" giving up?

[saulpw]

More like, if plugins.tsv is available (and maybe it should either be downloaded automatically like motd, or both could be combined into a larger vdnews.json or something), then on startup vd automatically creates stub provides functions if they don't already exist (i.e. the plugin hasn't been loaded):

def openurl_s3(*args):
    fail("not available by default; you might want to install the vds3 plugin")

[ajkerrigan]

Ohhhh neat, that'd work nicely.

[anjakefala]

Is there anything left here for @saulpw to do, or is it up to the community now to add "provides" columns/stubs in for their plugins?

[saulpw]

Kondo'ed.