Plugins Overview

The Internote plugin system lets you build custom interactive elements — simulations, visualisers, educational tools, creative experiments — and embed them in internotes using the same Chalk syntax as any built-in element. Once approved, plugins appear in the marketplace and are available to every educator on the platform.

What You Can Build

• Simulations — physics engines, particle systems, molecular models, circuit simulators
• Data visualisers — custom chart types, live dashboards, interactive plots not covered by the built-in diagram canvas
• Educational widgets — interactive geometry, language learning exercises, code execution environments
• Creative tools — generative art, procedural animation, sound-reactive visuals
• Domain-specific tools — anything the built-in element set does not cover

How Plugins Work

A plugin is a self-contained web application that runs in a sandboxed iframe embedded within the internote. The sandbox is fully isolated from the internote page — it cannot read auth tokens, access the parent DOM, or touch the host's storage. All communication between the plugin and the internote runtime flows through the Plugin SDK, which wraps a curated postMessage protocol.

Inside the sandbox, your plugin is a blank web page with full access to the browser's rendering stack. You can render with HTML and CSS, draw to a Canvas 2D context, use WebGL, or build a React component tree — anything a normal web page can do.

In Chalk, a plugin element looks like any other element. Educators import a plugin with one directive and place it in a scene's detail panel:

@plugin(src: plugins.internote.dev/particle-sim)

scene{
    Adjust the controls below to explore how gravity and particle count affect the system's behaviour.
}[
    parameter{
        Particle Count
    }(var: n; range: [10, 500]; step: 10; default: 100)

    particle-sim(particles: n; gravity: 2.0; size: (600, 400))
]

Where to Start

• Read Architecture first to understand the execution model and security guarantees before writing any code
• Follow Quickstart to scaffold a plugin and load it in the editor in under ten minutes
• Use the SDK Reference for the complete API when building your plugin
• Follow Publishing when you are ready to release to the marketplace