Antigen is a small set of functions that help you easily manage your shell (zsh) plugins, called bundles. The concept is pretty much the same as bundles in a typical vim+pathogen setup. Antigen is to zsh, what Vundle is to vim.
Please note that this is a very new project and can be considered beta at best. That said, I am using antigen full time now on my work machine.
Note: Please read the commit comments of the changesets when you pull a new version of antigen.
Enough talk. Let's fight! -- Po, Kung-fu Panda.
You're going to experience antigen right in your open shell. No .zshrc
tweaking and reading the rest of this documentation. Kinda like an ice-cream
sample, if you will.
Get and load antigen.
curl https://raw.github.com/zsh-users/antigen/master/antigen.zsh > antigen.zsh
source antigen.zsh
There. You now have all the antigen goodies. Let's try install some plugins. How about some color to start with. Get the syntax highlighting plugin by running
antigen-bundle zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting
Now let it do its thing and once you're back at your prompt, try and type a command. See that? Colors!
So, you do git? ruby? git and ruby? There are lots of awesome plugins over at oh-my-zsh. Treat yourself to some.
antigen-bundle robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh plugins/ruby
# Or for the lazy,
antigen-bundle git
There are lots of plugins out there in the wild and people are writing zsh utilities as small scripts all the time. Antigen is compatible with all of them. The plugins and scripts don't need any special handling to be compatible with antigen.
Another example, kennethreitz's autoenv (or my fork of it). Just a bundle command away.
antigen-bundle sharat87/autoenv
And boom! you have all the autoenv goodness. Just remember how you used to do these before antigen, clone it, modify your bashrc to source it, load a new terminal, all just to test it out. Duh!
A subtle aspect of this is that you can tell antigen to grab just about anything
from anyone's dotfiles
repo, as long as it is in a directory under any repo on
github.
And themes? How would you like a fancy new prompt for yourself?
antigen-theme funky
No? Not your taste? There are many themes available to you, check out the oh-my-zsh's page on themes.
You can install themes from unofficial repos too!
antigen-theme XsErG/zsh-themes themes/lazyuser
See? It's easy! To see how that works, refer to the section on the
antigen-theme
command further down.
Note: Many of those plugins and especially themes, assume you have the core library of oh-my-zsh loaded. So, if you want to experiment further, issue a
antigen-lib
and continue until you're tired. At which point you can come back to this page ;)
So, now that you're here, I suppose you are convinced and want antigen running your shell all the time. Sweet. Let's do it.
First, clone this repo, probably as a submodule if you have your dotfiles in a git repo,
git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/antigen.git
The usage should be very familiar to you if you use Vundle. A typical .zshrc
might look like this
source /path-to-antigen-clone/antigen.zsh
# Load the oh-my-zsh's library.
antigen-lib
# Bundles from the default repo (robbyrussell's oh-my-zsh).
antigen-bundle git
antigen-bundle heroku
antigen-bundle pip
antigen-bundle lein
antigen-bundle command-not-found
# Syntax highlighting bundle.
antigen-bundle zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting
# Load the theme.
antigen-theme robbyrussell
# Tell antigen that you're done.
antigen-apply
Open your zsh with this zshrc and you should see all the bundles you defined
here, getting installed. Once its done, you are ready to roll. The complete
syntax for the antigen-bundle
command is discussed further down on this page.
You can find more examples in the wiki: Antigen in the wild.
If you use zsh and oh-my-zsh, you know that having many different plugins that are developed by many different authors in a single (sub)repo is not very easy to maintain. There are some really fantastic plugins and utilities in oh-my-zsh, but having them all in a single repo doesn't really scale well. And I admire robbyrussell's efforts for reviewing and merging the gigantic number of pull requests the project gets. We need a better way of plugin management.
This was discussed on a few issues, but it doesn't look like there was any progress made. So, I'm trying to start this off with antigen, hoping to better this situation. Please note that I'm by no means a zsh or any shell script expert (far from it).
Inspired by vundle, antigen can pull oh-my-zsh style plugins from various github repositories. You are not limited to use plugins from the oh-my-zsh repository only and you don't need to maintain your own fork and pull from upstream every now and then. I actually encourage you to grab plugins and scripts from various sources, straight from the authors, before they even submit it to oh-my-zsh as a pull request.
Antigen also lets you switch the prompt theme with one command, just like that
antigen-theme candy
and your prompt is changed, just for this session of course (unless you put this
line in your .zshrc
).
The following are the commands provided by antigen. Note that the -
in the
following commands can be replaced with a space. You can write antigen-bundle ...
as antigen bundle ...
and get away with it. For more details see the help
on antigen
command further down in this section.
This command tells antigen to install (if not already installed) and load the given plugin. The simplest usage follows the following syntax.
antigen-bundle <plugin-name>
This will install and load the plugins/<name>
directory from robbyrussell's
oh-my-zsh (can be changed by setting ANTIGEN_DEFAULT_REPO_URL
).
However, the above is just syntax sugar for the extended syntax of the
antigen-bundle
command.
antigen-bundle [<url> [<loc>]]
where <url>
is the repository url and it defaults to robbyrussell's
oh-my-zsh repo (can be changed by setting ANTIGEN_DEFAULT_REPO_URL
discussed further down). <loc>
is the path under this repository which has the
zsh plugin. This is typically the directory that contains a *.plugin.zsh
file,
but it could contain a completion file or just many *.zsh
files to be sourced.
<loc>
defaults to /
, which indicates the repository itself is a plugin.
An example invocation would be
# The following is the same as `antigen-bundle ant`. But for demonstration
# purposes, we use the extended syntax here.
antigen-bundle https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh.git plugins/ant
This would install the ant plugin from robbyrussell's oh-my-zsh repo. Of course, github url's can be shortened.
antigen-bundle robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh plugins/ant
And since this repo is the default, even that isn't necessary. But we can't
specify the loc
without giving the first argument.
For this and a few other reasons, antigen-bundle
also supports a simple
keyword argument syntax, using which we can rewrite the above as
antigen-bundle --loc=plugins/ant
Which picks up the default for the url
argument, and uses the loc
given to
it.
Note that you can mix and match positional and keyword arguments. But you can't have positional arguments after keyword arguments.
antigen-bundle robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh --loc=plugins/ant
And keyword arguments don't care about the order in which the arguments are specified. The following is perfectly valid.
antigen-bundle --loc=plugins/ant --url=robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh
You can also specify a local directory on your file system as a bundle. In this
case, make sure the path you give is the absolute path (i.e., starts with a
/
). Relative paths are not supported. If the repo you gave is a local
directory path, then it is not necessary that this path is a git repo. Please
refer to the notes on --no-local-clone
below.
This command can also be used from your shell environment. This allows you to
install plugins on the fly and try them out. Of course if you want a bundle to
be available every time you open a shell, put it in your .zshrc
.
Other keyword-only arguments accepted:
--branch={git-branch-name}
— Specify the branch of the git repo to be
used for this bundle (without the braces of course). The default is whatever
branch the clone comes with, which is usually master
. For example,
antigen-bundle github-user/repo --branch=develop
This will get the plugin as in the branch develop
.
Note that if you specify two plugins to be loaded from the same git repo, but different branches, then two separate clones of this repo will be maintained. This is a small implementation detail and shouldn't influence you in any way.
--no-local-clone
— This command can be useful if you are developing a
plugin and already have a clone on your local file system. If this argument is
not given, even if the given repo url is a local path, a clone is made in the
$ADOTDIR/repos
, and the plugin is loaded from that clone. But, if you give
this argument, the plugin is sourced straight from the repo location, without
creating a clone. For example,
antigen-bundle /absolute/path/to/the/plugin --no-local-clone
Note that if the repo url is not an absolute local path or a branch has been
specified with the --branch
option, this argument has no effect. That is,
for this option to have any affect, the repo url must be an absolute local path
and no --branch
should be specified.
Also, if the local path given as the url is not a git repo, then this argument is forced as it doesn't makes sense to clone something that's not a git repo. This property can be used to load any utility scripts you have in your dotfiles repo. For example,
antigen-bundle $HOME/dotfiles/oh-my-zsh/custom
In addition to the above discussed arguments, antigen-bundle
also takes a
btype
keyword-only argument, that is used internally. You shouldn't be
concerned with this argument, its only used internally and will probably go away
in the future. It indicates whether the bundle is a theme or a simple plugin.
If you have a fair number of bundles, using the antigen-bundle
command can
look cumbersome. You can use the antigen-bundles
command to bulk define
bundles instead of individual calls to antigen-bundle
.
Usage is pretty straightforward. Just pipe the bundle specifications, just as
you would give to the antigen-bundle
command, one per line, into the
antigen-bundles
command. The easiest way to do this, is using the heredoc
syntax.
antigen-bundles <<EOBUNDLES
# Guess what to install when running an unknown command.
command-not-found
# The heroku tool helper plugin.
heroku
EOBUNDLES
This is equivalent to
antigen-bundle command-not-found
antigen-bundle heroku
Of course, as you can see, from the lines piped to antigen-bundles
, empty
lines and those starting with a #
are ignored. The rest are passed to
antigen-bundle
without any quoting rules applied. They are actually eval
-ed
with the antigen-bundle
command. See the source if you want to really
understand how it works. Its a very small function.
This is something you might not want to put in your .zshrc
. Instead, run it
occasionally to update all your plugins. It doesn't take any arguments.
antigen-update
Please note that the updates that are downloaded are not immediately available. You have to open a new shell to be able to see the changes. This is a limitation by design since reloading all the plugins might have some nasty side effects that may not be immediately apparent. Let's just say it can make your shell act real quirky.
Please note: This command is not for updating antigen itself. Its for
updating the bundles you are using with antigen. To update your copy of antigen,
use the selfupdate
command described further below.
Reverts the state of all your plugins to how they were before the last
antigen-update
. This command is currently experimental, so don't rely too much
on it. There is a test for it, and it passes, so it should work fine though.
Takes no options.
Insider detail: The information for reverting is stored in
$ADOTDIR/revert-info
file. If its not present, reverting is not possible.
Use this command to list out the currently loaded plugins. Keep in mind that this includes any bundles installed on-the-fly.
Takes no arguments. Gives out four entries per line of output, denoting the following fields of each bundle.
<repo-url> <loc> <btype> <has-local-clone?>
The btype
field is an internal detail, that specifies if the bundle is a
plugin
or a theme
.
The final field is true
or false
reflecting whether there is a local clone
for this bundle.
Used to clean up the clones of repos which are not used by any plugins currently loaded. It takes no arguments. When run, it lists out the repo-clones that are available but are not used by any plugin currently loaded.
This command, by default asks for confirmation before deleting the unused
clones. If the --force
argument is given, then this confirmation is not asked.
It straight away deletes all the unused clones. This option makes this command
usable in a non-interactive fashion.
This is (almost) the same as
antigen-bundle --loc=lib
So, it basically installs the oh-my-zsh's library as a bundle.
One other thing it does is that some oh-my-zsh plugins expect a $ZSH
set to
the full path of the oh-my-zsh clone being used. This is also set to the
correct path, if not already set to something else.
Please note that this assumes that the ANTIGEN_DEFAULT_REPO_URL
is set to the
oh-my-zsh repo or a fork of that repo. If you want to specify the url
too,
then you can't use the antigen-lib
short cut. You have to do that directly
with the antigen-bundle
command.
This is present to ease dealing with oh-my-zsh plugins.
Use
antigen-lib
in your .zshrc
, before any antigen-bundle
declarations. It takes no
arguments.
This is (almost, but not quite) the same as doing,
antigen-bundle sorin-ionescu/prezto
That is, initializes the canonical repo of the prezto framework. Please note that prezto support is very new and experimental in antigen. If you find any bugs, please report over on github issues.
Used for switching the prompt theme. Invoke it with the name of the theme you want to use.
antigen-theme fox
This will get the theme file located at themes/fox.zsh-theme
in the repo
specified by ANTIGEN_DEFAULT_REPO_URL
.
To pull themes from other repositories, use antigen-theme
just like
antigen-bundle
. Exactly the same, just make sure the url
and loc
combination point to a theme file, having a .zsh-theme
extension.
For example,
antigen-theme robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh themes/apple
Will pull the apple theme from the canonical oh-my-zsh repo. Also, note that the
.zsh-theme
extension is not present. It can be given, its optional.
You can use this command to change your theme on the fly in your shell. Go on,
try out a few themes in your shell before you set it in your .zshrc
.
Note: Some themes use functions that are loaded by antigen-lib
. So, to
avoid any trouble, run antigen-lib
if you haven't already before experimenting
with themes. If you have antigen-lib
in your .zshrc
, you're covered.
Note: Do not provide the --btype
argument to antigen-theme
. Its an
internal argument.
You have to add this command after defining all bundles you need, in your zshrc. The completions defined by your bundles will be loaded at this step.
It is possible to load completions as and when a bundle is specified with the
bundle command, in which case this command would not be necessary. But loading
the completions is a time-consuming process, so if the completions were loaded
at every call to antigen-bundle
, your shell will start noticeably slow when
you have a good number of bundle specifications.
However, if you can suggest a way so that this would not be necessary, I am very interested in discussing it. Please open up an issue with your details. Thanks.
Creates a snapshot of all the clones you currently have active including the
git version hash they are at and save it to a snapshot file. Active means, the
clones for those listed by antigen-cleanup
are not included in the snapshot.
Takes one optional argument, the file name in which the snapshot is to be saved.
Defaults to antigen-snapshot
.
Note: The snapshot currently only contains the details of those bundles
that have a clone. That is, bundles that have --no-local-clone
set or are
directly sourced from your file system (without a git repo), are not recorded
in the snapshot file.
Restore the bundles state as specified in the snapshot. Takes one required argument, the snapshot file name to read.
Although it restores the clones of the repos specified in the snapshot file, any other clones present in your environment are not touched. This behavior may change in the future.
Use this command to update your copy of antigen. It basically does a git pull
on your antigen's clone, if it is a git clone. Otherwise, it doesn't do
anything.
Takes no options.
This exists so that there can be some help right in the command line. Currently it doesn't provide much help other than redirecting you to the project page for documentation. It is intended to provide more meaning and sub-command specific help in the future.
I could use some help here as I'm not that good at writing documentation that looks good as output on the command line.
This is a parent command that mainly exists for convenience. This exists so the following two can be the same.
antigen-list
antigen list
and
antigen-help
antigen help
Because of this, we can create aliases like
alias a=antigen
alias an=antigen
and run the antigen commands without making them look annoyingly long.
a bundle ruby
a theme candy
a list
And even...
an update
The following environment variables can be set to customize the behavior of
antigen. Make sure you set them before source-ing antigen.zsh
.
ANTIGEN_DEFAULT_REPO_URL
— This is the default repository url that is
used for bundle
commands. The default value is robbyrussell's oh-my-zsh repo,
but you can set this to the fork url of your own fork.
ADOTDIR
— This directory is used to store all the repo clones, your
bundles, themes, caches and everything else antigen requires to run smoothly.
Defaults to $HOME/.antigen
.
Note: ANTIGEN_REPO_CACHE
& ANTIGEN_BUNDLE_DIR
— These variables
were used previously but are now removed. Please use ADOTDIR
instead, as
mentioned above.
All the tests are in the tests
folder and are run using the cram test
system. The latest version on that website, as of today is v0.5, which does not
have the --shell
argument which is required to run our tests. So, to get the
correct version of cram, run
pip install -r requirements.txt
With that, once you have cram installed, you can run the tests as
make
If you are making a feature addition, I'd really appreciate if you can add a test for your feature. Even if you can add a test for an existing feature, that would be great as the tests are currently seriously lagging behind the full functionality of antigen.
Most shell utilities/plugins are made up of just one file. For a plugin called
awesomeness
, create a awesomeness.plugin.zsh
and code away.
That said, even if you write a single file as a .sh
file with the goodness you
want to create, antigen will work just fine with it. The *.plugin.zsh
way is
recommended by antigen, because it is widely used because of the oh-my-zsh
project.
If you want to know how antigen loads the plugins, do continue.
Firstly, antigen looks for a *.plugin.zsh
file in the plugin directory. If
present, it will source only this script. Nothing else is sourced. This is for
oh-my-zsh style plugins.
Secondly, it looks for a init.zsh
file in the plugin directory. If present, it
will source only this script. Nothing else is sourced. This is for prezto
style modules.
Otherwise, it looks for *.zsh
files and if there are any, all of them are
sourced. The order in which they are sourced is not currently defined. Please
don't rely on this order. Nothing else is sourced after all the *.zsh
scripts.
If no *.zsh
files are present, it finally looks for any *.sh
files and
sources all of them. Again, the order in which they are sourced in not
currently defined.
No matter which (or none) of the above happen to be sourced, this plugin
directory is added to the zsh's function path ($fpath
) so that any completions
in it are loaded.
One exception to this rule is that if this plugin is a theme. In which case the
theme script is just sourced and nothing else is done. Not even adding to
$fpath
.
Antigen is licensed with the MIT License. To contribute, just fork, make changes and send a pull request. If its a rather long/complicated change, please consider opening an issue first so we can discuss it out.
Any comments/suggestions/feedback welcome. Please say hello to me (@sharat87) on twitter. Or open an issue to discuss something (anything!) about the project ;).