Writing an editor plugin

An editor backend is what nf-meta editor --editor <name> launches. This walks through adding one as an installable plugin. See BaseEditor for the full contract.

1. Subclass BaseEditor

# my_editor_package/editor.py
from nf_meta.editor import BaseEditor


class MyEditor(BaseEditor):
    EDITOR_NAME = "my-editor"

    def start(self) -> None:
        ...  # block until the user is done editing

• EDITOR_NAME is required. Defining it registers the class (via BaseEditor.__init_subclass__) and is the string users pass to --editor.
• Don't override __init__. self.options (an EditorOptions) is already set; read self.options.host/.port from there if your backend serves over HTTP.
• start() should block until the user is finished (the built-in BrowserEditor runs its server synchronously in the calling thread). It isn't expected to return while editing is still in progress.

2. Advertise it as a plugin

nf-meta discovers editor plugins via the nf_meta.editors entry-point group:

[project.entry-points."nf_meta.editors"]
my-editor = "my_editor_package.editor:MyEditor"

Once installed alongside nf-meta, my-editor appears in nf-meta editor --editor without any change to nf-meta itself.

3. Verify

pip install -e .   # or however your plugin package installs
nf-meta editor --editor my-editor metapipeline.yaml

As with runner plugins, a plugin module that fails to import is skipped with a logged warning rather than a hard failure. Check that first if my-editor doesn't show up as a choice.