JNC Tools Free Manager

[Jesse Cogswell]

Merry Christmas, friends.  I have long struggled with making my plug-ins easier to install and keep up to date, and I have finally finished writing a manager application that can do just that.  I have migrated all of my plug-ins over to GitHub and have a database system to track updates and bugs.  The JNC Tools Free Manager includes every plug-in that I've written for the forums and has ways to access release notes, bug reports, wishlist items, and readme pages (still catching up on these, more coming along).

 

 

It will highlight plug-ins with new versions and will inform you of new manager versions when they are released.  It will handle installing the plug-ins into your active user folder, the only thing you'll have to do is add them to your workspace the first time you install them.

 

The manager is compatible with any version of Vectorworks 2019 or newer on PC, and 2021 and newer on Mac and requires internet access to work.  Attached to this post is a Vectorworks 2019 file called JNC Tools Free Manager Download.  It contains simple instructions to install the manager file (it does most of the work for you), and should remain up to date for the foreseeable future.

 

The one caveat to all of this is that I do not have regular access to a Mac, so there may be some errors that pop up on that platform.  If you should encounter any errors, please share any error messages and I will fix it as soon as I am able.  I borrowed a Macbook last month to help iron out some issues, but I fixed some bugs the other day on PC and don't know if they were fixed on the Mac side.

 

Please reach out if you have any questions, concerns, or wishes.

JNC Tools Free Manager Download.vwx

[MarcelP102]

Merry Christmas Jesse, thanks for the present 😀

[Jesse Cogswell]

@Sebastiaan I'm not seeing your post now, so I trust you figured it out, but that error comes from not having the manager in your workspace.  The embedded script does a check to see if you have the plug-in installed, and if you do, it tries to run a DoMenuTextByName call to run it.  If it's not in your workspace, it can't do that.

 

I am planning on giving the user an option to automate adding the tools to your workspace as they are installed, but the scripts to edit the workspace are poorly documented, and I haven't quite cracked how to do it without crashing Vectorworks.

[Sebastiaan]

2 hours ago, Jesse Cogswell said:

@Sebastiaan I'm not seeing your post now, so I trust you figured it out, but that error comes from not having the manager in your workspace.  The embedded script does a check to see if you have the plug-in installed, and if you do, it tries to run a DoMenuTextByName call to run it.  If it's not in your workspace, it can't do that.

 

I am planning on giving the user an option to automate adding the tools to your workspace as they are installed, but the scripts to edit the workspace are poorly documented, and I haven't quite cracked how to do it without crashing Vectorworks.

hi Yes sorry I did not see the plug in in the workspace editor at first. But it was there the second time I looked 🙂. So that’s why I deleted the post. 
 

thank you again for all that work! 

[Thomas K.]

The finest collection on the internet presented by Jesse!

 

Thank you for your work!

[Cristiano Alves]

WOW, really good job.

Can I give you the suggestion to add a tab for "other developers' plugins"?

 

[Jesse Cogswell]

@Cristiano Alves Would you mind clarifying your comment?  Are you asking for my tool to be able to install and update work from other developers or a tab containing hyperlinks to other developers' websites as a form of advertisement?

[Cristiano Alves]

On 6/20/2025 at 7:42 PM, Jesse Cogswell said:

@Cristiano Alves (...) to be able to install and update work from other developers

Obrigado antes de mais pela tua resposta @Jesse Cogswell

Nowadays, with everything in the cloud, it's a bit confusing how we have to keep copying files into directories, but we can't do anything about it.
However, when I saw your post, I thought about it.
I always have some problems with plugins whenever I format my computers at the end of each season (and I use Windows and Mac).

It would be nice to have a tool where we could add all the plugins and quickly install what we need.

[Jesse Cogswell]

@Cristiano Alves Unfortunately this is something that you will need to take up with Vectorworks.  My system is entirely proprietary and relies on having all of the code hosted on GitHub with a database tracking version history, bugs, and feature requests.  Unless the other developers hosted their code on GitHub and had a matching database and gave me a key to access the code, there's nothing I can really do.

 

I wrote this manager application over the course of last summer after extensive research on GitHub, Python, and GitPython.  My entire goal was to try to simplify the way users access my plug-ins and keep them up to date so that I could get away from writing out the full instructions every time I post and to avoid someone finding an out of date version of the plug-ins somewhere on these forums.  But none of the tools to track this kind of information exist in native Vectorscript, so it would be quite difficult to work with other developers' tools.

 

That being said, I'm completely open to sharing the tools that I've written with other developers so that they can develop their own manager applications, but they would need to reach out to me and ask for them.

Edited June 22, 2025 by Jesse Cogswell

[Jesse Cogswell]

Good morning, friends.  I've been testing this with the newly released VW2026 and am happy to report that it should still work exactly as expected.

 

That being said, due to a new security feature in VW2026, you will get a warning every time you open Vectorworks if you use my plug-ins.  After installing the Manager from the VW file linked above and restarting, you'll get a warning that looks like this:

 

 

Select the JNC Tools Free Manager and press the Enable button, then the Restart button in the bottom right.  When Vectorworks restarts, you'll get the same dialog but with the Load Status changed to "Enabled".  You can safely press the Continue button.

 

Unfortunately, for every plug-in you install from the Manager, you will have to Enable it from the dialog next time you open Vectorworks.  The dialog is a bit unfortunate in that you can only select one plug-in at a time, so if you use the Update / Install All button to install all 50 (at the time of this post) plug-ins, it means that you will need to spend some time enabling the plug-ins.  You also can't sort the list by the Load Status column, so I can see it being difficult to to track down additional plug-ins if you decide to install or add a plug-in later, though they at least color code it.

 

 

I'll be adding this information to both the README file on GitHub as well as the JNC Tools Free Manager Download.vwx file used to install it.  Hopefully I'll have these up sometime this evening.

 

Sorry for the inconvenience.

[Jesse Cogswell]

Happy New Year, friends.

 

Thank you all for being patient with the Unknown Developer dialog malarkey.  It has been on my list of things to fix since last September, but the fall and early winter proved rather difficult for finding the actual time to do it.  Thanks to the holidays, I finally got around to the fix.  If you update the JNC Tools Free Manager plug-in to 1.1.0 (or newer for when I inevitably change something), the necessary Credentials files will automatically be downloaded when you install a plug-in.  The manager will likewise install its own Credentials file if it is missing when you open it.  I have also added a button called Update Credentials, which will download and update the Credentials files for all installed plug-ins.

 

This Credentials system will only affect you when open the manager in VW2026 or newer, the button will not appear in older versions.

 

In other news, while I was rooting through the code, I added support for selecting more than one row at a time.  If more than one row is selected, you won't be able to press the View Readme, GitHub Page, or any of the Release Notes buttons, but you can press the Update/Install button to take care of multiple plug-ins at once.

 

 

I should mention that while I have tested all of this on a Windows machine, I have not yet tested this on a Mac.  The download process is slightly different between the two platforms, so if you run into any issues with this on a Mac, please let me know as soon as possible so I can get it fixed.

[Amanda McDermott]

On 1/2/2026 at 12:17 AM, Jesse Cogswell said:

Happy New Year, friends.

 

Thank you all for being patient with the Unknown Developer dialog malarkey.  It has been on my list of things to fix since last September, but the fall and early winter proved rather difficult for finding the actual time to do it.  Thanks to the holidays, I finally got around to the fix.  If you update the JNC Tools Free Manager plug-in to 1.1.0 (or newer for when I inevitably change something), the necessary Credentials files will automatically be downloaded when you install a plug-in.  The manager will likewise install its own Credentials file if it is missing when you open it.  I have also added a button called Update Credentials, which will download and update the Credentials files for all installed plug-ins.

 

This Credentials system will only affect you when open the manager in VW2026 or newer, the button will not appear in older versions.

 

In other news, while I was rooting through the code, I added support for selecting more than one row at a time.  If more than one row is selected, you won't be able to press the View Readme, GitHub Page, or any of the Release Notes buttons, but you can press the Update/Install button to take care of multiple plug-ins at once.

 

 

I should mention that while I have tested all of this on a Windows machine, I have not yet tested this on a Mac.  The download process is slightly different between the two platforms, so if you run into any issues with this on a Mac, please let me know as soon as possible so I can get it fixed.

 

Hi @Jesse Cogswell , thanks for all of this, I'm excited about the concept! I've sort of got it working, but generally getting this (despite being connected to fast internet) when I try to open it from 'Tools' menu - any suggestions? 

 

 

 

 

 

[Amanda McDermott]

p.s. Is there a help file/idiot's guide anywhere that details what each of the plugins does, please? Generally they're nicely named, and I can probably guess, but it would be handy...

[Jesse Cogswell]

@Amanda McDermott When you launch the command, the tool accesses the database of plug-ins from my GitHub and determines the which ones are installed and which version.  If that database is inaccessible, you'll see the message you posted about.  I see no reason why you should have difficulty accessing it (GitHub is generally rock solid and I haven't been notified about any planned outages), so my guess would be that your internet may be unstable and for the very brief moment that the tool checks the database.  How often are you seeing the message?  I see that you are on Windows, is there a chance that you have Vectorworks set to not be able to access the network?

 

As for help files, some of the plug-ins have a "readme" file written that details exactly how they work (like this one), with instructions and example screenshots.  If you select one in the Manager, if a readme is available the View Readme button will become enabled.  I've been pretty good about writing the documentation before I add a plug-in to the Manager, but only in the last year.  I recognize that there is a huge backlog of plug-ins without such documentation, but almost all of them were written for folks on this forum, so you can do a Google search of Vectorworks forums <plug-in name> and generally find the forum topic that prompted me to write the plug-in, and I those will definitely explain how they work.  Writing out the formal documentation can be really time consuming, and my paid work always takes precedence, so I can't really say when the older plug-ins and tools will get documentation unless people start pressing the Donate on Paypal button.

[Amanda McDermott]

Thanks @Jesse Cogswell - I was getting the message pretty consistently, but occasionally able to get into it. Thanks for the tips on 'readme' files etc, I'll have a look. And thanks again for the tool/s, look forward to using it/the plugins!