Plugin Browser

Help users discover and explore skills, agents, commands, and plugins from community and official repositories.

Catalog

The catalog at ~/.claude/skills/plugin-browser/references/catalog.json lists all indexed repositories with descriptions and topics. Read it first to understand what's available and which repo is most relevant to the user's need.

Each entry has these fields: github (source repo), local_path (where it's cloned), description (what it contains), topics (keyword tags), and content_types (e.g. skills, agents, commands, plugins).

All repos are cloned and indexed together under a single path:

~/.claude/skills-references/plugin-browser/

Each repo lives at the local_path specified in the catalog (e.g., ~/.claude/skills-references/plugin-browser/wshobson-agents/).

Search

Always start with semantic search — it combines semantic understanding with BM25 keyword matching, so it surfaces conceptually relevant results even when exact keywords differ. Only fall back to keyword search if semantic search returns no results or the index is unavailable.

Primary — semantic search:

mcp__claude-context__search_code(
  path="~/.claude/skills-references/plugin-browser",
  query="<user need>"
)

Fallback — keyword search (only when semantic search fails or is unavailable). Use grep and find through Bash: they also search hidden folders such as .claude-plugin/, where plugin manifests live.

grep -ril --include='*.md' "<keyword>" ~/.claude/skills-references/plugin-browser/

Browse

To list contents of a specific plugin or repo:

find ~/.claude/skills-references/plugin-browser/<repo-dir> -name '*.md' -not -path '*/.git/*'

For structured plugin repos (like wshobson-agents), check for a marketplace.json or plugin.json for richer metadata:

find ~/.claude/skills-references/plugin-browser/<repo-dir> \( -name 'marketplace.json' -o -name 'plugin.json' \) -not -path '*/.git/*'

Workflow

1. Understand the need — ask clarifying questions if the user's request is vague (e.g., "security" could mean AppSec scanning, smart contract auditing, or secrets detection).
2. Catalog — read ~/.claude/skills/plugin-browser/references/catalog.json to identify which repos are relevant based on descriptions and topics.
3. Search — use semantic search to find matching components across all repos.
4. Read before recommending — read the component's SKILL.md, README, or plugin.json before presenting it. Understand what it does, what tools it needs, and any dependencies.
5. Present matches — show name, description, source repo, and category. When multiple options exist, compare them briefly.
6. Review for safety — before installing, warn the user that community plugins are third-party content. They may request broad tool permissions, modify settings or permission files, execute shell commands via hooks, or overwrite existing configuration. Advise the user to review the plugin's contents (especially allowed-tools, hooks, and any shell scripts) before proceeding.
7. Install (if requested) — copy selected files into the user's .claude/ directory (skills, agents, commands). Confirm before copying and warn if destination files already exist. Browse the repo's directory layout first to determine the correct source paths, since not all repos follow the same structure.