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Encore Features are Maestro’s system for shipping powerful capabilities that aren’t essential for every user. A feature that is off is completely invisible - no shortcuts, no menu items, no command palette entries - which keeps the core app lean while letting power users opt into advanced workflows. Usage & Stats, Director’s Notes, Maestro Cue, and Maestro Symphony start on; the rest start off. They are now managed as plugins. Every Encore Feature ships as a built-in (“first-party”) plugin, listed in the same catalog as community plugins and turned on the same way. What changed is the plumbing and the settings screen, not the idea: a feature you have not enabled still adds nothing to your keyboard, your menus, or your palette.

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Enabling a feature

Open Settings (Cmd+, / Ctrl+,) and go to the Plugins tab. Every built-in feature is listed there as a card with its category, its release date, and whether it is currently enabled. The Plugins tab in Settings, listing every built-in Encore Feature Click a card to open its detail view, then use the Enable / Disable button. Features that carry their own options show them on a Settings tab beneath that button, and the capabilities the feature is allowed to use are itemized under Permissions. A plugin's detail view, with its own settings and permission list Narrow the catalog with the chips (Encore, then Automation, Agents, Insights, UI, Data, Dev Tools, Other), the search box, or the Only installed toggle. Sort switches between A-Z and newest-first.

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Encore vs Beta

A built-in card carries one of two badges, and the badge says where the feature is in its life: Encore is not a category, so it sits before them in the chip row rather than among them: a graduated feature still belongs to Automation or Insights, and the chip cuts across all of them to answer “what ships on?” in one click. Community plugins are never Encore; one shows a Beta badge only when its own manifest declares it.
Built-in features work with the community plugin subsystem switched off - that is the default, and the banner at the top of the tab says so. Enable plugins turns on loading of third-party plugins as well. You do not need it to use anything below.

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Available features

Features without a shortcut are not opened from the keyboard: they change how something you already use behaves, rather than putting a new surface on screen.
Disabling a feature hides its surfaces; it does not delete what you already have. Turning Groups+ off, for example, collapses your group folders back to a flat list and stops drawing the icons and colors, but the nesting and appearance you set are still stored and come back when you re-enable it.
Usage & Stats is the one to know about. It is what records the activity every other reporting surface reads. With it off, the Usage Dashboard has nothing to show, and the gap is permanent - Maestro does not backfill activity from a period when recording was disabled.

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For Developers

Want to build a new Encore Feature? The architecture is designed for easy extension - add a flag, wire up the toggle, gate the access points, and your feature ships behind a clean opt-in. Ship it off by default while it proves itself; flip its entry in DEFAULT_ENCORE_FEATURES (src/shared/encoreFeatures.ts) when it graduates. See the Encore Features contributor guide for the full implementation checklist, architecture details, and the canonical reference implementation (Director’s Notes).