Install plugin

Install plugin finds fman plugins on GitHub, downloads one, unpacks it into your data directory and loads it — without a restart.

Running it

Press Ctrl+Shift+P and run Install plugin. There is no default key binding, and the command works regardless of which pane has focus.

It also takes an optional github_repo parameter of the form owner/name. Passing it skips the picker and installs that repo directly — this is how fman's own "you pressed a key that does nothing" dialog offers you mherrmann/ArrowNavigation and mherrmann/SwitchPanesWithArrowKeys.

What happens

Discover — fman queries GitHub for repos carrying both the topics fman and plugin, and caches the result for the rest of the fman session.
Pick — the results appear in a quicksearch picker: the plugin name, the repo description as the subtitle, and the star count as the hint (123 ★). Plugins you already have are filtered out.
Resolve a version — fman asks for the repo's latest release tag. If the repo has never published a release, it falls back to the newest commit on the default branch. So an unreleased plugin still installs; it is just pinned to a commit.
Download and unpack into %APPDATA%\fman\Plugins\Third-party\<repo name>.
Load it in place, at its correct position in the load order, and show Plugin 'X' was successfully installed.

The steps that block show a status message while they run — Fetching available plugins…, Downloading X….

The order of the list

The picker lists most recently pushed first, with the most-starred first among equally recent ones. Stars break ties only: a 900-star plugin last touched in 2019 still ranks below a one-star plugin pushed this morning.

That is deliberately not GitHub's own relevance order — for a query that is nothing but two topics, relevance is near-uniform and the resulting order is effectively arbitrary. It is also not GitHub's "recently updated", which any metadata change bumps: renaming a repo or editing its description would float an abandoned plugin to the top.

A repo that has never been pushed to sorts to the bottom, where the star count decides the order.

Rate limits and privacy

fman talks to the public GitHub API anonymously — no token, no sign-in. Anonymous calls are limited to 60 requests an hour per IP, and search to 10 a minute. A normal install is three or four requests, so on a shared or NAT'd address you may still hit the limit.
fman sends no identifying data with these requests. GitHub sees your IP and the default user agent, and nothing in the URL but the query.
Nothing is contacted until you run the command. fman does not poll GitHub in the background, and there is no update check for installed plugins.

Updating a plugin

There is no Update plugin command. Updating means Remove plugin, then Install plugin again.

After an install, fman records the repo and the installed version in the plugin's Plugin.json:

{ "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/mherrmann/ArrowNavigation", "ref": "v1.0.2" }

ref is a release tag, or a commit SHA when the plugin had no release. List plugins reads it back and shows it beside each third-party plugin, abbreviating a SHA to its first 8 characters.

When it goes wrong

Symptom	Cause
Could not fetch available plugins: `<reason>`.	Network, DNS or TLS failure during the search.
Nothing in the picker	No repo carries both the `fman` and `plugin` topics, or you already have all of them.
Plugin X seems to already be installed.	The destination directory exists. Remove it first — nothing is ever overwritten.
HTTP 403	GitHub rate limit. Wait, or install by `owner/name` to spend fewer requests.

If loading fails after the download, no success alert appears — but the files are already on disk, so remove the directory, or use Remove plugin, before retrying.

Installing without GitHub

Nothing about fman's plugin loader requires GitHub. Copy a plugin directory into %APPDATA%\fman\Plugins\User\ and run Reload plugins.

On macOS and Linux that path is ~/Library/Application Support/fman/Plugins/User and ~/.config/fman/Plugins/User; setting FMAN_DATA_DIRECTORY moves it anywhere.