Plugins
Plugins extend Altretta with new features and panels — and unlike community plugins elsewhere, every Altretta plugin is cryptographically signed, runs in a sandbox, and can only touch what you explicitly allow. You get the reach of a plugin ecosystem without handing a third party the keys to your machine.
Obsidian's community plugins run with full access to your system — your entire filesystem, the network, and anything the app can do. That flexibility is also the risk: a plugin can read files far outside your vault, phone home, or misbehave, and you have little visibility into it. Altretta takes the opposite stance: plugins are signed, sandboxed, and permission-scoped by default, and you see exactly what each one is allowed to do before it ever runs.
What a plugin can do
- Add new commands, views, and workflows to the app.
- Contribute its own panels to the workspace — for example, a task dashboard that reads your notes. See Plugin panels.
- Integrate with the rest of Altretta through a documented plugin API.
What a plugin cannot do is act silently. It runs in an isolated runtime with no unfettered access to your files, the network, or the system, and anything sensitive — like reading your note contents — requires a permission you grant explicitly.
The trust difference
Three properties set Altretta's plugins apart. Every one of them is on by default.
| Property | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Signed | Each plugin is cryptographically signed, so Altretta can verify it is authentic and unmodified before installing it. |
| Sandboxed | Plugins run in an isolated JavaScript runtime with no unfettered filesystem, network, or system access. |
| Permission-scoped | A plugin declares the permissions it needs; you see and approve them before enabling, and you can review them at any time. |
Read the full picture in How plugins stay safe.
The official Hub
Altretta plugins come from an official, first-party catalog — the Hub. It's curated by Apilium and is not user-editable, so what you browse and install has gone through a known door rather than an anonymous list. Browse and install from it in Install & manage plugins.
Start here
Install & manage plugins
Browse the Hub, install, enable or disable, and remove plugins — and review requested permissions before enabling.
How plugins stay safe
Signing, the sandbox, and permission scopes — the security model in plain terms.
Plugin panels
How plugins contribute their own panels and UI to your workspace.
Developing a plugin
A high-level look for developers who want to build one and publish to the catalog.