Skip to main content

Plugin Organization System/Hierarchy on Drop Down

Feature Request

As a writer who simultaneously works on multiple projects (in different stages and genres), a plugin menu organizational system would improve my efficiency and experience with Sudowrite.

Problem: I use many diverse plugins. With the current non-hierarchial plugin drop-down menu, I find myself spending valuable potential writing time reorganizing or scrolling through the endless drop-down menu to find relevant plugins.

Suggested Feature Requirements:

  • Improve navigability of the dropdown menu by removing/hiding/avoiding plugins irrelevant to my current work.

  • Support menu personalization options (so I can define my own criteria for what plugins are/aren’t relevant to my current project).

  • Keep the functionality to default show some plugins across all projects/folders.

  • (Low priority) Allow personal renaming of shared plugins (so I can keep consistent naming conventions for the plugins that I use, making them easier to find).

Example Use Case: I have story-specific plugins that generate suggestions based on the speaking style/pattern of a specific first-person narrator character. These are very valuable to the story with that narrator, so I don’t want to delete them. However, when I switch to another story with a different narrator, POV, or genre, the additional plugins just create clutter that can become time-consuming to scroll past.

Possible Solutions:

I could see this working mostly through a hierarchical system on the dropdown itself (maybe allowing users to organize plugins into folders that show up as directories/subdirectories on the dropdown) and/or perhaps the ability to add ‘tags’ to plugins which are used to populate the drop-down. For example, users could tag plugins as for general use, for use in specific projects/folders, or even as custom-created tag categories — allowing users the flexibility to organize plugin menus via things like ‘project X’ ‘romance’, ‘editing’, ‘dialogue’, or ‘set in project X world’.

Some other related posts where other users are looking for a solution for a similar use case (all still seem to be in the ‘Proposed’ phase as of now, so adding this request to reiterate this is still a user want):

Posted by Bridget Harkness ·
9 comments

Log in to comment and vote

Comments9

  • Nicole Broussard

    •

    Jun 29

    •

    Merged request

    Folders For Plugins (Assume we want folders for everything?)

    Reordering plugins didn't really solve the issue of the extensive list for me - and I'm sure others. I don't use plugins often, but honestly there have been a few times I wanted to use a plugin and got impatient trying to find it so I went to my GPT instead. Alphabetizing the plugins is my current solution that I will tackle, but this doesn't solve the issue of having to scroll ALL THE WAY DOWN to reach First Draft, which I often use. If we had folders to sort out plugins, that could dramatically shorten the menu length. I could have two main folders for nonfiction and fiction, and then subfolders could be inside each of those. So for fiction, I could have a subfolder for character plugins, one for subplots, one for analyzers, etc. One alternative that we have also been begging for is to remove the SW features that are in the plugin menu and aren't plugins. Combine them with the brainstorm button and bring back the "more" button title. This will at least not force us to scroll ALL THE WAY DOWN to reach those tools.

    • Karistina Lafae

      •

      Dec 4, 2024

      Please. Dragging plugins to reorder them it exceptionally tedious. It would be less tedious if we had collapsible folders to help us organize plugins rather than just reordering them. I would use this all the time because plugins are an important part of my workflow and I need to add/remove a lot of plugins for teaching my classes.

    • Echo Grayce

      •

      Dec 6, 2024

      As I was wasting time today reordering my plugins, I was thinking this very thing. Right now I’m doing them in order of story production much in the way they are organized on the main page by subject. Reordering them is a huge time suck. I would love folders I could mark: Brainstorming, Outlining, Writing, Editing, etc. I’m disappointed to see this suggestion has been hanging out here for three months and nothing.