The Git Fancy plugin is a fancy Git panel for the web UI: branches, working-tree changes with ±line stats, paginated commit history, commit details, and a full-width Monaco diff tab. It follows the VSCode “editor view” semantics — diffs open in the main editor area as dynamic tabs.

The backend (plugins/xbot-git-fancy/) is a pure stdio IPC Go plugin: xbot spawns the binary and drives it via JSON-over-stdio (protocol.Run). All git commands are read-only and execute in the session’s working directory (injected by the server as params.cwd); the plugin itself is stateless.

• Status panel (right sidebar) — current branch, clean/dirty state, ahead/behind, working-tree changes (path, status, ±lines)
• Commit history — paginated (skip/limit + total count, “load more” supported)
• Commit details — author, email, ISO date, message, touched files with numstat ±line counts
• Diff tab — full-width Monaco DiffEditor for any changed file (working tree vs HEAD, or commit-scoped via git show); original/modified file content served for the native diff view
• Branch list — current + local branches
• Safe by design — GIT_OPTIONAL_LOCKS=0 on every command; no writes, no mutations

cd plugins/xbot-git-fancy
make build          # → bin/git-fancy-plugin
make install        # → ~/.xbot/plugins/xbot.git-fancy/

Or from the repository root: make plugins-install. Dev mode without install: make plugins-build + XBOT_PLUGIN_DIRS="$(pwd)/plugins" xbot.

The frontend views (web/src/plugins/git-fancy/: index.tsx, commit.tsx, shared.tsx) are bundled into the web build — the plugin.json web declaration (entry, view contributions) is what registers them with the frontend plugin runtime. The backend binary serves the panel’s data via RPC.

The plugin declares a configuration schema in plugin.json (editable from the plugin manager panel):

web Git panel (right sidebar)
  → ctx.rpc.call('xbot.git-fancy.status', { cwd })
  → xbot web_plugin_rpc handler → stdio RPC to the git-fancy process
  → git command executed in session CWD (read-only)
  → structured JSON result → panel render

commit click → openViewTab('xbot.git-fancy.commit', { hash })
  → commit view (main editor area, dynamic tab)
  → ctx.ui.openFileTab(path) / openViewTab(diff) → Monaco DiffEditor

{
  "id": "xbot.git-fancy",
  "runtime": "stdio",
  "entry": "./bin/git-fancy-plugin",
  "activationEvents": ["onStart"],
  "permissions": ["rpc", "ui"],
  "web": {
    "entry": "index.js",
    "contributes": [
      { "kind": "view", "id": "xbot.git-fancy.panel", "container": "right_sidebar", "title": "Git" },
      { "kind": "view", "id": "xbot.git-fancy.commit", "container": "main", "title": "Commit", "dynamic": true }
    ]
  }
}

Note the permissions array: the frontend plugin context is built from it — the ui permission is what makes ctx.ui.openViewTab available. A manifest that declares container:"main" views but omits "ui" will fail silently (the open-diff-tab click does nothing). This is guarded by plugins/xbot-git-fancy/main_test.go (TestManifestPermissions).

cwd is injected by the server’s web_plugin_rpc handler from the session’s current directory — the plugin never guesses the user’s workspace.

parseUnifiedDiff converts git diff output into line-level entries (hunk/add/del/ctx/meta) with old/new line numbers, so the frontend can render VSCode-style ± coloring. Untracked files are rendered as all-additions (original = empty). Commit-scoped diffs use git show <commit>:<path> for both sides; a missing side (added/deleted file, root commit) yields an empty string instead of an error.

cd plugins/xbot-git-fancy
go test ./...