A plugin is a small add-on that teaches the terminal something new: a new exchange to connect to, a new AI model to use, a new panel to put on a board, a new theme.
Almost everything in Pairlens is one, including the parts that shipped with it. That has two consequences worth knowing. New capabilities can arrive without waiting for an app update. And you can remove what you do not use, which is how you get rid of a whole asset class you never trade rather than scrolling past it forever.
Open Plugins in the left nav.
What plugins can add
Venues. Market data and order routing for an exchange, broker, or DEX.
AI providers. Inference and web search.
Panels. New tiles for your workspaces.
Indicators. Custom chart indicators, including Python ones other people wrote.
Themes. Eighteen ship in the box, and more can be installed.
Workflow steps and notification channels, extending the automation canvases.
Installing
Three routes:
From the store. Browse or search, open a plugin’s page, review what it declares, and install. One click.
From a zip. Import plugin takes a .zip you were sent, or that you
exported from the indicator workbench. Drag and drop onto the installed tab
works too.
From a URL. For plugins hosted outside the registry.
Installed plugins can be enabled, disabled, configured, or removed at any time. Disabling Pairlens Core is possible and will empty most of your terminal, so the app asks twice. Uninstalling it is not possible at all.
Uninstalling and reinstalling built-ins
The plugins that shipped with Pairlens are install units like any other. Open a plugin’s store page and Uninstall removes it: it stops loading at boot, its panels go, its venue disappears from the pair picker, and any capability override pointing at it is dropped.
The code still lives in the app, so getting it back costs nothing. The plugin keeps its place in the store, now labelled Install, and one click brings it back from the binary with its old configuration intact. No download, no network, and it stays a built-in rather than being rewritten as a registry plugin.
Two related actions that are not the same thing:
Disable keeps the plugin installed and configured, just dormant. Use it when you want a venue out of the way for a week.
Uninstall removes it. Use it when you want the thing gone.
Dropping an asset class
Uninstall the family’s plugins and the asset class is gone from your terminal: no venues, no panels, nothing in search. Prediction markets, for example, are three plugins:
- Pairlens Predictions (the events browser and the positions panel)
- Kalshi
- Polymarket
Uninstall those three and there is no prediction surface left anywhere in the app. The same pattern works for any class: Crypto Futures is Pairlens CEX Futures plus Binance, KuCoin and Kraken perpetuals; Equities is Alpaca plus Pairlens Equities, which ships the stock layouts; On-Chain DEX is the chain connectors plus the LI.FI bridge, the Helius Solana RPC provider, the DEX data providers and Pairlens DEX, which ships the on-chain layouts; Memecoins is the Memecoin Feed and Pairlens Memecoins, which ships the launchpad board. The Installed tab’s family groups tell you exactly which plugins are in each one.
If you only want them out of the way rather than gone, the family switch on the Installed tab disables every member in one click.
Families
Every plugin we ship belongs to a family, and the Installed tab groups them that way rather than listing sixty-odd entries alphabetically.
| Family | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Core | The terminal itself: charts, order book, trade entry, workspaces |
| Intelligence | Hosted AI, instrument discovery, news, market intelligence |
| Crypto Exchanges | The 14 centralized spot venues |
| Crypto Futures | Binance, KuCoin and Kraken perpetuals, the positions panel, the perps desk, Coinglass Liquidations |
| On-Chain DEX | Swap venues, the LI.FI bridge, the Solana RPC provider, DEX data providers, and Pairlens DEX for the on-chain layouts |
| Memecoins | The keyless launchpad feed and Pairlens Memecoins for the four-column board and the memecoin layouts |
| Equities | Alpaca, and Pairlens Equities for the stock layouts |
| Prediction Markets | Kalshi, Polymarket, the event panels, the prediction layouts |
| AI Providers | Bring-your-own-key models and web search |
| Themes | The eighteen bundled themes |
Each group carries one switch that enables or disables everything inside it, so turning off an asset class you never trade is one click rather than fourteen. Core and Intelligence carry no switch, because the terminal does not run without them.
Families are grouping and policy only. Nothing about a plugin’s id, its capabilities, or your saved layouts depends on which family it is in, and plugins you installed yourself are grouped by where they came from rather than being swept into ours.
What a family does take with it is its ready-made layouts. An asset-class plugin ships the workspaces built for its class, so disabling Prediction Markets removes the prediction desk and the event-market home board from the Workspace Store, the Workspaces menu, and Discovery on the spot. Layouts you have already saved are untouched, and enabling the family brings the ready-made ones back. See workspaces.
Deciding which asset classes you see is yours: install and uninstall the family’s plugins in the store, in any combination you like. An organization shipping its own build can take the decision away entirely and exclude a family at build time, which is how a desk ships a terminal with no equities surfaces at all and no way to add them. See self-hosting.
Trust tiers
This is the part worth reading before you install something.
Bundled. Ships with Pairlens, runs with full access. The connectors, the core panels, the first-party AI providers.
Community. Submitted by the community and reviewed lightly. The source lives in the Pairlens repo, CI validates it, and the registry builds and signs it itself. Community plugins always run in the sandbox: they can reach only the network hosts they declare, and can never read your exchange keys, touch your wallets, or place a trade. A community plugin that asks for full access is refused rather than presented as a choice.
Third-party. Published to the registry by a developer with their own signing key. Installs sandboxed by default. Full access is an explicit grant you make per plugin, never a default, and the store tells you what you are granting before you grant it.
Every package is cryptographically signed and verified before it loads. An unsigned or tampered package will not run at all.
Declared network hosts
A plugin has to list, up front, the exact internet addresses it needs to reach.
You approve that list before any traffic is allowed, and the app enforces it: a
connector that declared api.exchange.com cannot quietly call anywhere else.
The plugin’s store page shows this list. A market connector needing its exchange’s API is expected. A theme needing network access is not.
Themes
Eighteen themes ship in the box, from Terminal Classic and Zen Trading through Cyberpunk Neon, Sakura Bloom, Infrared, High Contrast, and Boomerg, which turns the whole terminal amber-on-black and monospace. Apply one from the Plugin Store, or from Settings → Appearance, or with the omni-search Theme action. Light and dark modes are independent of the theme, and System follows your OS.
Custom Python indicators resolve semantic colours against the active theme, so your own indicators stay legible in all of them.
Platform compatibility
Some plugins are desktop-only, usually because they need native capabilities a browser cannot provide, and some are browser-only. The store badges them and refuses to activate one on the wrong platform rather than failing at runtime.
Building your own
The Plugin Store has a Build your own plugin section with the scaffold command and the packaging steps. The host provides React, the Pairlens SDK, the design system, and the charts engine at runtime, so your bundle stays small. Start at the Plugin SDK.