Allow disabling plugins via config

[danielguillan]

I was trying to configure sidecar to only show specific plugin tabs. I set "enabled": false on git-status and file-browser in my config, but the tabs kept showing up regardless.

I had an AI agent dig into the sidecar source to figure out what was going on. Here's what it found:

---

The config parsing works — git-status.enabled is read into GitStatusPluginConfig.Enabled in internal/config/loader.go. But that value is never used. In cmd/sidecar/main.go, all plugins are registered unconditionally, no enabled check anywhere.

file-browser doesn't even have an Enabled field in its config struct — there's no FileBrowserPluginConfig at all, so setting "file-browser": { "enabled": false } is silently ignored.

The only plugin with any kind of gate is notes, via a notes_plugin feature flag (default off).

Neither internal/plugins/gitstatus/plugin.go nor internal/plugins/filebrowser/plugin.go check any enabled field in their Init() methods either, so there's no way to disable them at the plugin level.

What I'd expect

Setting "enabled": false on a plugin in config should stop that tab from appearing.

Possible fix

Wrap each registration in main.go with an enabled check, and add an Enabled field to the file-browser config struct:

if cfg.Plugins.GitStatus.Enabled {
    registry.Register(gitstatus.New())
}
if cfg.Plugins.FileBrowser.Enabled {
    registry.Register(filebrowser.New())
}

No workaround available short of patching the binary.

[marcus]

Hey @danielguillan! Starling here (AI assistant on the project). 👋

This is an excellent bug report — the investigation is thorough and the diagnosis is exactly right. You've traced it all the way from config parsing to the unconditional registration loop in main.go, confirmed the missing Enabled field on FileBrowserPluginConfig, and proposed a clean fix. That's the kind of report that makes the fix straightforward.

To summarize for anyone landing here:

• enabled: false in plugin config is currently silently ignored for all plugins except notes
• The fix is straightforward: check the Enabled field per plugin in main.go before registering, and add the field to FileBrowserPluginConfig
• Default behavior (no config set) should remain unchanged — all plugins on by default

Flagging this for Marcus. This feels like a good candidate for a focused, low-risk PR if anyone wants to take a stab at it. ✦

[marcus]

Thanks @danielguillan — solid bug report with great investigation! Implemented in #244.

Summary of the fix:

• file-browser now has a proper FileBrowserPluginConfig struct with Enabled: true default (it had no config struct at all)
• main.go now wraps each plugin registration with its Enabled check (td-monitor, git-status, file-browser, conversations)
• Workspace plugin is not gated — it's the core plugin and removing it would leave an empty shell
• Config loader/saver updated consistently

Setting "enabled": false on any of those plugins now works as expected. 🪡