Plugins — Mini Diarium Documentation

What Are Plugins?

Mini Diarium supports custom import and export formats through Rhai script plugins. Rhai is a simple, sandboxed scripting language that runs inside the app. You can write a plugin to handle any file format that the built-in options do not cover.

Plugins appear in the Import and Export overlay dropdowns alongside the built-in formats.

Where Is the Plugins Folder?

The plugins/ folder is shared across all journals and lives in the app data directory (this location is fixed — it does not change when you configure a different journal path in Preferences):

Windows: %APPDATA%\com.minidiarium\plugins\
macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/com.minidiarium/plugins/
Linux: ~/.local/share/com.minidiarium/plugins/

A README.md file with templates and API documentation is auto-generated in the plugins folder on first launch. If you previously had .rhai scripts in a per-journal plugins/ folder, they are automatically copied to this central location on first launch after upgrading.

Writing a Plugin

Each plugin is a single .rhai file with a metadata comment header and one entry-point function.

Import Plugin

// @name: My Custom Format
        // @type: import
        // @extensions: json
        
        fn parse(content) {
            let data = parse_json(content);
            let entries = [];
            for item in data {
                entries += #{
                    date: item.date,       // must be YYYY-MM-DD
                    title: item.title,
                    text: item.body,       // should be HTML
                };
            }
            entries
        }

Export Plugin

// @name: Plain Text
        // @type: export
        // @extensions: txt
        
        fn format_entries(entries) {
            let output = "";
            for entry in entries {
                output += entry.date + " - " + entry.title + "\n";
                output += html_to_markdown(entry.text) + "\n\n";
            }
            output
        }

Available Helper Functions

Function	Description
`parse_json(string)`	Parse a JSON string into a map or array
`count_words(string)`	Count words in a string
`now_rfc3339()`	Current timestamp in RFC 3339 format
`html_to_markdown(string)`	Convert HTML to Markdown

Rules and Limitations

Import scripts must define fn parse(content) returning an array of entry maps.
Export scripts must define fn format_entries(entries) returning a string. (export is a reserved word in Rhai, so the function is named format_entries.)
The date field must be in YYYY-MM-DD format.
The text field should contain HTML (the editor uses HTML internally).
Scripts run in a sandbox: no file system access, no network access.
Scripts are limited to 1,000,000 operations to prevent infinite loops.
Tags are not currently passed to Rhai export scripts. Each entry map contains date, title, text, word_count, date_created, and date_updated. Tag support for Rhai plugins will be added in a future release.

Official Example

An official example plugin is included in the repository at docs/user-plugins/plain-text-timeline.rhai.

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