Sigla

Using with Claude

Sigla ships two bundled Claude skills — small, self-contained knowledge packets that teach Claude (Claude Code, Claude.ai, any skill-aware host) what Sigla is, how its CLI works, and how to author extensions. Drop them into your Claude config once and Claude stops asking you to re-explain manifest fields, scheme handlers, or fence-label resolution on every conversation.

Requires Sigla 0.5 or later (mdv --version).

One-shot install

mdv skill extract             # → ~/.claude/skills/sigla/
mdv skill extract plugin-dev  # → ~/.claude/skills/plugin-dev/

That’s it. Claude Code reads ~/.claude/skills/ on session start; restart your Claude Code session (or open a new one) and the skills are available.

Confirm they’re loaded:

mdv skill list                # what's bundled
ls ~/.claude/skills/          # what's installed

Which skill should I extract?

You want to…Extract
Drive Sigla from the command line, write CSS themes, tune settings, debug rendering, understand the URL scheme handlerssigla
Author a sigla.json extension manifest, debug an ExtensionDiagnostic, harden HTML against the user-extension sanitizer, choose between bundled and user distributionplugin-dev

You can install both — they don’t conflict. Claude’s skill matcher picks the right one based on what you’re asking. Most users want sigla; install plugin-dev only if you’re building extensions.

Try it

After install, open a new Claude Code session inside any Sigla repo or markdown vault and try one of these:

With the sigla skill:

Write me a minimal Sigla custom CSS theme that mimics
the appearance of an old terminal: dark background,
monospace body, phosphor-green text.
What UserDefaults key controls Sigla's PDF export header
text, and how do I set it from the command line?
The graphviz fence in my markdown isn't rendering — what
should I check?

With the plugin-dev skill:

Write me a sigla.json template-kind extension that
renders ```ascii fences with a fixed-width box-drawing
border around the content.
My extension is showing up in Settings → Extensions
with a `.htmlSlotTooLarge` diagnostic — what's the
limit and how do I split my template?
What's the difference between `binary.search` and
$SIGLA_BINARY_<ID> for a process-kind extension?

Claude will pull the relevant reference file from the skill on-demand (manifest schema, security model, debugging playbook, etc.) — you don’t need to paste anything.

Where the skill files live

After extraction:

~/.claude/skills/
├── sigla/
│   ├── SKILL.md
│   └── references/
│       ├── cli-reference.md
│       ├── fence-labels.md
│       ├── scheme-handlers.md
│       └── settings-keys.md
└── plugin-dev/
    ├── SKILL.md
    └── references/
        ├── bundled-extensions.md
        ├── debugging.md
        ├── manifest-schema.md
        └── security-model.md

The SKILL.md frontmatter carries schema: claude-skill/v1 plus product: sigla and product_version: <release> — pinned so a future Anthropic skill-format migration is a search-and-replace.

Refreshing after a Sigla upgrade

The bundled skill version tracks the app. After brew upgrade --cask sigla (or any Sigla release), re-extract to pick up new fields, fence labels, or extensions:

mdv skill extract --force             # overwrites ~/.claude/skills/sigla
mdv skill extract plugin-dev --force  # overwrites ~/.claude/skills/plugin-dev

--force overwrites; without it, mdv skill extract refuses to clobber the existing directory and exits with code 1.

Custom destinations

The first non-flag positional argument is the skill name; the second is the destination. If you’d rather keep your Claude config under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME or share skills across machines via a synced dotfiles repo:

mdv skill extract plugin-dev ~/dotfiles/claude/skills/plugin-dev

A bare relative or absolute path (anything with / or starting with .) without a name argument is treated as a destination for the default sigla skill:

mdv skill extract ./local-skill        # → ./local-skill/ (sigla skill)

What the skills don’t do

  • They don’t run Sigla. Claude reading the skill can answer questions and write code; you still launch the app yourself.
  • They don’t ship sample documents. Use the bundled fixtures inside the app or your own vault.
  • They don’t carry secrets, telemetry, or anything online. The skill files are plain markdown — read them with cat ~/.claude/skills/sigla/SKILL.md if you’re curious what Claude sees.