hermes - 💡(How to fix) Fix Windows: three bugs from daily use (plugin discovery, gateway exit code, Unicode decode

1. Plugin discovery skips nested subdirectories — bundled DDGS not found Severity: Medium — bundled functionality silently unavailable The DuckDuckGo search provider (ddgs) lives at plugins/web/ddgs/provider.py, but Hermes never discovers it. Two problems: Missing plugin.yaml — ddgs/ directory ships without one (every plugin dir requires one) Wrong directory depth — get_bundled_plugins_dir() scans plugins/<name>/plugin.yaml, but ddgs is at plugins/web/ddgs/ (nested under the intermediate web/ directory) A user-side workaround (~/.hermes/plugins/ddgs/ with plugin.yaml + self-contained provider) also did not surface in hermes tools after gateway restart. Expected: Plugin discovery recurses into subdirectories, or web/ddgs is moved to plugins/ddgs/.
2. hermes gateway restart exits with alarming NTSTATUS code Severity: Minor — restart succeeds but exit code is misleading Running hermes gateway restart in background mode exits with code 3221225786 (0xC000013A = STATUS_CONTROL_C_EXIT). The restart itself works — old gateway is terminated and replacement starts — but the exit code makes it look like a crash to monitoring tools or agent logic that checks exit_code. Expected: Exit code 0 after a successful restart.
3. hermes gateway status produces UnicodeDecodeError on Windows Severity: Minor — status check works but with traceback noise UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xce in position 2: invalid continuation byte Exception in thread Thread-7 (_readerthread): ... Likely caused by Windows console output containing non-UTF-8 bytes (e.g. GBK-encoded Chinese characters in status output). The status check itself passes (✓ Gateway process running), but the traceback spam is noisy. Expected: Clean output, no decode errors. Environment (all three bugs) Windows 10 (native, not WSL) Python 3.11 Hermes installed at site-packages Gateway: Windows Scheduled Task + VBS launcher Terminal: local backend, bash via git-bash/MSYS

Fix / Workaround

1. Plugin discovery skips nested subdirectories — bundled DDGS not found Severity: Medium — bundled functionality silently unavailable The DuckDuckGo search provider (ddgs) lives at plugins/web/ddgs/provider.py, but Hermes never discovers it. Two problems: Missing plugin.yaml — ddgs/ directory ships without one (every plugin dir requires one) Wrong directory depth — get_bundled_plugins_dir() scans plugins/<name>/plugin.yaml, but ddgs is at plugins/web/ddgs/ (nested under the intermediate web/ directory) A user-side workaround (~/.hermes/plugins/ddgs/ with plugin.yaml + self-contained provider) also did not surface in hermes tools after gateway restart. Expected: Plugin discovery recurses into subdirectories, or web/ddgs is moved to plugins/ddgs/.
2. hermes gateway restart exits with alarming NTSTATUS code Severity: Minor — restart succeeds but exit code is misleading Running hermes gateway restart in background mode exits with code 3221225786 (0xC000013A = STATUS_CONTROL_C_EXIT). The restart itself works — old gateway is terminated and replacement starts — but the exit code makes it look like a crash to monitoring tools or agent logic that checks exit_code. Expected: Exit code 0 after a successful restart.
3. hermes gateway status produces UnicodeDecodeError on Windows Severity: Minor — status check works but with traceback noise UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xce in position 2: invalid continuation byte Exception in thread Thread-7 (_readerthread): ... Likely caused by Windows console output containing non-UTF-8 bytes (e.g. GBK-encoded Chinese characters in status output). The status check itself passes (✓ Gateway process running), but the traceback spam is noisy. Expected: Clean output, no decode errors. Environment (all three bugs) Windows 10 (native, not WSL) Python 3.11 Hermes installed at site-packages Gateway: Windows Scheduled Task + VBS launcher Terminal: local backend, bash via git-bash/MSYS