building custom buttons or panels to add to IDA

Question

I've been looking for a way to add custom panels or buttons to the IDA interface, primarily to track custom scripts rather then remembering a ton of short cuts or having to click through menus to get to them. Does anyone have any experience with this or is it even possible? The only thing I've been able to find was a document from Hex-Rays about how to set up your environment but nothing about adding custom buttons/panels/windows.

UPDATE:

I stumbled on this while looking into some DLL issues with QtPy and it looks like using a custom build of PySide from Hex-Rays is going to be the way to do it.

Answer 1

Since IDA 6.7 it is now possible to use the Action api to create menu items and/or toolbar buttons using the API function register_action. Prior to IDA 6.7 it was possible to add menu items using the limited API add_menu_item.

This hex-rays blog post describes the new API compared to the old one and provides an example.