Avoiding Unregistration Hell

When your extension is unloaded or uninstalled, you must clean up everything you registered. If you forget to unregister a command or an event listener, it can lead to memory leaks, weird bugs and leftover components. This is what we call "unregistration hell".

DisposableManager

To solve this, Xed-Editor provides a DisposableManager to handle this cleanup for you. Instead of manually unregistering every single item in onDispose, you can register them with the manager.

When the extension is unloaded, the manager will automatically go through everything you added and unregister it correctly.

Example: Registering a Command

Here is how you register a command using the DisposableManager.

class Main(context: ExtensionContext) : ExtensionAPI(context) {
    private val dm = DisposableManager() // 1. Instantiate manager

    override fun onLoad() {
        val myCommand = MyAwesomeCommand()

        // 2. Register with the manager
        CommandProvider.registerCommand(myCommand, dm)
    }

    override fun onDispose() {
        // 3. Just call dispose() and everything is cleaned up!
        dm.dispose()
    }
}

Whilst you cannot use the DisposableManager for all registrations (e.g. Editor Events), it can still significantly reduce the amount of boilerplate code in your extension.