nsis-plugins-corpus

Every plugin listed on the NSIS wiki's Category:Plugins, downloaded and laid out so a path that works against NSISDIR works here too.

This is a shadow of NSISDIR, not a replacement for it. Nothing here is installed into the real NSIS tree, and nothing here is on makensis's default search path. Point at it explicitly when you want it:

!addplugindir "path/to/nsis-plugins-corpus/tree/Plugins/x86-unicode"

Why it exists

A plugin's output count cannot be discovered — NSIS offers no way to ask a DLL how many values it pushes, and getting it wrong unbalances the stack with no diagnostic from anybody. Documentation is not a reliable substitute: for AccessControl, the readme, the wiki page and the way real installers call it each imply a different answer, and all three are wrong. Only the source settles it.

So the number that matters most is this one:

Plugin pages on the wiki	200
Archives that still download	161
Plugins shipping source	129

690 .c/.cpp/.pas/.h files. That is the evidence base for anything that has to state an arity.

Layout

tree/           a shadow NSISDIR -- Plugins/ Docs/ Include/ Examples/ Contrib/
by-plugin/      each archive extracted on its own, provenance intact
archives/       the downloaded .zip/.7z, untouched
pages/          nothing (scratch, kept so the fetcher can resume)
plugins.json    the 200 wiki page names
links.json      page -> archive URLs found on it
status.json     page -> local archive, or why not
merge-report.json  files placed, and every colliding path
fetch.log       what happened, with timestamps

Use tree/ to build against and by-plugin/ to read. The merge is lossy on purpose — two plugins shipping Include/Foo.nsh collide, and the collision is recorded rather than resolved — so by-plugin/ is the authority on who shipped what.

Arch directories

Twenty years of archives agree on nothing: ANSI, Release_Unicode, ReleaseU, i386-ansi, x64, Unicode/Plugins/ and a bare DLL in Plugins/ all appear. tree/ is normalised onto NSIS 3's four directories: the nearest directory above a DLL that names a charset or a bitness decides where it goes, and a DLL with no such label is x86-ansi, because that is what "old enough to be unlabelled" means. Debug builds are left out of tree/; by-plugin/ still has them.

	DLLs
x86-ansi	158
x86-unicode	51
amd64-unicode	16
amd64-ansi	4

Rebuilding

python3 fetch_plugins.py   # list pages, find archives, download, extract
python3 merge_tree.py      # build tree/ from by-plugin/

Both are resumable — they skip anything already on disk, so a re-run picks up new plugins and repairs partial fetches without re-downloading. fetch_plugins.py sleeps 0.6 s between requests and sends a real user agent; the wiki is volunteer-run, so leave that alone.

Known gaps

• 34 of the 200 pages link no archive. Most describe a plugin hosted off-wiki (GitHub, a personal site) or document one that ships with NSIS.
• HelpButton could not be recovered (checked 2026-10-08). darklogic.org is now a parked domain that answers every URL with an HTML landing page, and the Wayback Machine has only the 2007 /win32/nsis/ index, not helpbutton_v0_9.zip.
• 8 archives came from somewhere other than the first link. Five wiki pages link a File: description page rather than the upload itself, so the file was taken from its /mediawiki/images/ URL (Blowfish++, ButtonEvent, PopupListBox, RealProgress, SetCursor); fetch_plugins.py now does this itself. ApplicationID's own site now serves HTML, so it came from the GitHub release the page also links. Metadl came from the Wayback Machine's 2011 capture, and Nsisdbg from its 2007 capture of the author's older kverka.no/~saivert mirror -- the saivert.com link on the wiki redirected there before it died.
• The wiki is not the whole ecosystem. Inetc, NScurl and nsJSON are actively developed on GitHub, and the wiki copy may lag. Check upstream before trusting a version number here.
• Nothing is verified, signed, or scanned. These are binaries downloaded from a public wiki; treat them as untrusted input and read the source, which is why the source is the point.