Date: 2/7/2025
Adobe announced all CEP Extensions will need to be migrated to UXP Plugins in 2018.
In 2019 UXP was introduced in Adobe’s XD application as the first implementation. Many developers of all Adobe apps (not just XD) began testing the new UXP system to find what was working and what wasn’t.
One of the biggest items missing was CLI access. I made a post in May 2019 explaining how CLI access is required for many CEP panels to function to access external binaries like FFMPEG, Jimp, OpenCV, and custom licensing systems, and running system commands that Adobe’s API doesn’t provide access to.
The post received immense support from the developer community, however the response from Adobe was consistently:
No, CLI access through UXP is a security risk, we cannot allow this.
Over the course of many years of discussions in the forums and on Adobe’s office hours, UXP began in Photoshop and eventually the new concept of UXP Hybrid Plugins was introduced as the “solution” to the CLI access problem.
Users could now build a C++ Hybrid Plugin component onto their JavaScript UXP plugin and get full access to the system, including running CLI commands.
The barrier to entry for building a C++ Hybrid Plugin was very steep, especially since the majority of CEP now UXP developers are used to working in JavaScript and not as fluent if at all in C++.
With the help of aescripts, we built Bolt UXP as a way for users to jumpstart their UXP development and included a UXP Hybrid Plugin that ships with an execSync() function so users of Bolt UXP can start accessing the Command Line without having to build and sign their own C++ Hybrid Plugins from scratch.
While this partial solution was working and many Photoshop developers could take advantage of it, we had a new problem, InDesign and eventually Premiere Pro would introduce UXP without Hybrid Plugin support. So for developers wanting to migrate their tools from CEP to UXP in InDesign or Premiere Pro had no way of doing so if they needed external binaries or CLI access.
As of February 2025, InDesign is about to introduce Hybrid Plugins, but Premiere Pro is still a ways off. And based on history, we can only assume the same pattern will be repeated for other Adobe apps to come.