Video Blog

Making an IDE Plugin for DrRacket

:: racket, drracket, tutorial

By: Leif Andersen

I recently had several students ask me to show them how to make DrRacket plugins for their new language. It is easy to do, but I noticed that there aren any existing guides on how to do it. There is the plugin documentation, which is a good reference and has some good examples. Unfortunately, it lacks a good step by step tutorial on how to make new IDE plugins. This post is that tutorial.

DrRacket plugins fall into one of two main categories:

  1. Language-Specific Plugins
  2. Global Plugins

The former only enables the plugin when the user is editing a file in that plugin’s associated language. The latter, however, is for plugins that should always be enabled, such as DrRacket’s Vim Mode. This tutorial covers both plugin styles.