# Windows plugins?

**URL:** <https://forum.graphviz.org/t/windows-plugins/3309>\
**Category:** Dev\
**Created:** [February 23, 2026, 10:27pm UTC](https://forum.graphviz.org/t/windows-plugins/3309 "2026-02-23T22:27:45Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![brianrmurphy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ce73a5/32.png) [@brianrmurphy](https://forum.graphviz.org/u/brianrmurphy)\
**Post date:** [February 23, 2026, 10:27pm UTC](https://forum.graphviz.org/t/windows-plugins/3309/1 "2026-02-23T22:27:45Z")

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Now that I’ve found problems with MinGW, I’m wondering if plugins are working on other Windows builds.

In particular, the MinGW .dll files are being placed far away from the index file `pkgIndex.tcl` so when I run manually under MinGW with the current build it cannot find the `.dll` files from the `TCLLIBPATH` set in `ci/mingw-test.sh` (which points to the `pkgindex.tcl` directory). Copying the `.dll` files into that directory fixes things. Other plugins similarly are putting libraries in bin/ instead of the lib/graphviz/$LANGUAGE directories on Windows.

I don’t see how this would be used in other Windows environments, and now I note there are only build tests, not running tests, on any other Windows platform. Why is there a regression test for mingw? Perhaps there are users of these libraries somewhere?

However, the doc page below shows builds which set `--disable-tcl` so I’m not confident about this.

-Brian

> **[Windows](https://graphviz.org/doc/winbuild.html)**
>
> For building on Windows:
> (Graphviz versions ≥ 12.2.0)
> CMake is now the only supported build system on Windows. For details, see DEVELOPERS.md and .gitlab-ci.yml .
> (Graphviz versions ≥ 2.41 and ≤ 12.1.2)
> First, in the root of the repository, perform...

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**Author:** ![mark](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/graphviz/user_avatar/forum.graphviz.org/mark/32/84_2.png) [@mark](https://forum.graphviz.org/u/mark)\
**Post date:** [February 24, 2026, 9:47am UTC](https://forum.graphviz.org/t/windows-plugins/3309/2 "2026-02-24T09:47:45Z")

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We don’t really have much way of knowing who uses Graphviz on MinGW. Maybe there are none, or maybe there are some. But almost nobody really tells us when they’re using Graphviz.

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**Author:** ![brianrmurphy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ce73a5/32.png) [@brianrmurphy](https://forum.graphviz.org/u/brianrmurphy)\
**Post date:** [February 24, 2026, 6:05pm UTC](https://forum.graphviz.org/t/windows-plugins/3309/3 "2026-02-24T18:05:21Z")

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Well, here’s one data point:

> **[Graphviz 14.1.2](https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/Graphviz)**
>
> Graph visualization is a way of representing structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks

**Downloads:**

### 2,482,439

**Downloads of v 14.1.2:**

### 44,716

**Last Update:**

### 24 Jan 2026

Not clear what that means. Probably no real use, certainly not with Tcl. I probably count for 2 of those downloads myself, on machines that aren’t currently useable. 🙂

Interestingly, the “Portable” package is 2.38.20180209:

> **[Graphviz (Portable) 2.38.20180209](https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/graphviz.portable)**
>
> Chocolatey is software management automation for Windows that wraps installers, executables, zips, and scripts into compiled packages. Chocolatey integrates w/SCCM, Puppet, Chef, etc. Chocolatey is trusted by businesses to manage software...

Meanwhile, Debian Unstable also has 14.1.2, with a number of bugs reported: [I Challenge Thee](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?dist=unstable;package=graphviz)

More searches found this promsiing TCL project `https://github.com/mittelmark/DGTcl/` which has a “Graphviz” filter, but it actually just runs the CLI `dot.exe` command.