If you want to get a sense of how vibrant the community around Bohemian Coding’s Sketch is, take a look at the plethora of plugins being written by independent developers to supplement the app’s core functionality. They’re a small but growing number, and full of creativity and ingenuity. Some of my favorites are RenameIt, which allows you to quickly change the name of a group of layers with sequential numbering, and Content Generator, which instantly creates objects with dummy data.

This plugin market is still in its infancy; almost all of them are free, and most all are ongoing GitHub projects rather than completed works. The new utility Sketch Toolbox, now in beta, may help advance the state of the art though. It provides a user-friendly plugin management interface that gives you access to virtually all known Sketch plugins at a glance; you can install any plugin directly from Sketch Toolbox without having to manually download and install it. This surmounts a huge barrier for accessing these plugins; grabbing one from its GitHub page is not difficult, but it’s far less convenient than it could be, as Sketch Toolbox ably demonstrates.

If it’s successful, Sketch Toolbox could spur developers to create more polished plugins, and may even give them an opportunity to sell them, essentially creating an App Store-like ecosystem. That’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves, though; for now, it does plenty in simply providing an elegant solution to an annoying problem. I’d say it’s an invaluable aid to any designer working in Sketch, and during the beta it’s free, to boot.