Usually, a plugin is invoked through a hotkey or the menu system. The registered and loaded plugins will appear in a special Edit|Plugins submenu. A plugin may provide better analysis, automation of tedious tasks, etc.
The plugin modules reside in the "plugins" subdirectory of IDA. IDA is able to find and load all the plugins from this directory automatically.
However, you can write a configuration file and tell IDA how to load plugins. To do so, you need to modify the "plugins.cfg" file in the "plugins" subdirectory.
The format of this file is simple:
Empty lines and lines starting with ';' are comment lines. Other lines must have the following structure:
menuname filename hotkey arg
Example:
Undefine undef Alt-U 0If the filename doesn't include the file extension or the directory, IDA will add them. The plugin modules have the following extensions:
Windows: *.dll Linux: *.so Mac: *.dylibNote: plugins compiled with support for 64-bit address space, will feature a '64' suffix before the extension. E.g., 'pdb64.dll'
For more details, see information on individual plugin modules.
See also Edit submenu.