Plugins, Addins, Extensions, oh my!

Published on Wednesday, November 14, 2007

We are hard at work on the next generation of Banshee, and I'll be posting details and juicy screencasts and screenshots soon. What I'm curious about now is what we should call Plugins in our UI. We use Mono.Addins in trunk now, and I have been thinking about renaming Plugins in the UI to something else, such as Extensions. My first thought was, "what does everyone else use?"

That wasn't so helpful:

  • Banshee, Totem, gedit: Plugins
  • F-Spot, Epiphany, Firefox: Extensions
  • Tomboy: Add-ins

While this is just a small sampling of GNOME applications I thought of in 30 seconds, by far I think Tomboy loses. Add-ins, especially hyphenated, is weird. Note that Firefox seems to mix Extensions and Add-ons. Extra weird.

So the vote is between keeping it Plugins or switching to Extensions. I don't care either way, but it would be nice to settle on some consistency within GNOME. Or maybe it doesn't matter. Just a thought.

Some other names we have thought of include: Plugstensions, Bundleups, Snap-Ins, Snap-Ons, and snorp even recommended Butt-Plugs, but I don't want to think too far into that one. I am sure Strap-Ons was in the running at some point too.

This is where you leave your €0.02. I hope it gets philosophical.

UPDATE: It seems like Extensions wins. Bugs filed against Totem, gedit, Rhythmbox, Tomboy, MonoDevelop, and Banshee. Other applications I've run across are already using Extensions, like F-Spot and Epiphany.