# Antigen 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. # Quick Usage First, clone this repo, probably as a submodule if you have your dotfiles in a git repo, git clone https://github.com/sharat87/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. bundle-lib # Bundles from the default repo (robbyrussell's oh-my-zsh). bundle git bundle heroku bundle pip bundle lein bundle command-not-found # Syntax highlighting bundle. bundle zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting # Load the theme. bundle-theme robbyrussell # Tell antigen that you're done. bundle-apply Open your zsh with this zshrc and run `bundle-install` and you should be ready to roll. The complete syntax for the `bundle` command is discussed further down on this page. # Motivation 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 a 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 mergine the gigantic number of pull requests the project gets. It needs a better way of plugin management. This was discussed on [a][1] [few][2] [issues][3], 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). [1]: https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/issues/465 [2]: https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/issues/377 [3]: https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/issues/1014 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. Antigen also lets you switch the prompt theme with one command, just like that bundle-theme candy and your prompt is changed, just for this session of course. # Commands ## bundle This is the command you use to tell antigen that you want to use a plugin. The simplest usage follows the following syntax bundle This will add the `plugins/` directory from [robbyrussell's oh-my-zsh][oh-my-zsh] (can be changed by setting `ANTIGEN_DEFAULT_REPO_URL`). However, the above is just syntax sugar for the real syntax of the `bundle` command. bundle [ [ []]] where `` is the repository url and it defaults to [robbyrussell's oh-my-zsh][oh-my-zsh] repo. `` 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 too. `` defaults to `/`, which indicates the repository itself is a plugin. `` is the name with which this plugin will be identified. This plugin will be installed in the bundles directory with this name used as the directory name. If the `` is not given, antigen tries to make an intelligent guess based on the other given arguments. An example invocation would be bundle https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh.git plugins/ant This would install the ant plugin (with `` as `ant`) from robbyrussell's oh-my-zsh repo. Of course, github url's can be shortened. bundle robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh plugins/ant And since this 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, `bundle` also supports a simple keyword argument syntax, using which we can rewrite the above as bundle --loc=plugins/ant Which is the same as bundle ant (In the short syntax sugar introduced at the start of this section). Note that you can mix and match positional and keyword arguments. But you can't have positional arguments after starting keyword arguments. 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. bundle --loc=plugins/ant --url=robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh --name=ant In addition to the above discussed arguments, `bundle` also takes the following arguments but only as keyword arguments. `load` — Set to `true` (default) or `false`. If this is set to `false`, the plugin specified is only recorded, may be for future use. It is not loaded into the environment. But with `true`, the plugin is immediately sourced and is ready to use, which is the default behavior. ## bundle-install This is something you might not want to put in your `.zshrc`. Instead, run it to install all the recorded bundles, using the `bundle` command. It has the following syntax. bundle-install [--update] The optional `--update` argument can be given to update all your plugins from the server. By default, `bundle-install` does *not* check for updates on the plugins. It just installs them, if there is a cached copy available and if its not already installed. ## bundle-install! This is the same as running bundle-install --update That is, it installs the recorded plugins, and updates them to the latest available versions. ## bundle-cleanup Used to clean up unused bundles. It takes no arguments. When this is run, it lists out the plugins that are installed but are not recorded with a `bundle` command, and will ask you if you want to delete them. This command currently cannot run in a non-interactive mode. So it won't be very pleasant to use it in your `.zshrc`. ## bundle-lib This currently exists only to make is possible to use oh-my-zsh's library, since its organisation is different from that of plugins. If you want to load oh-my-zsh's library, which you very likely do, put a bundle-lib in your `.zshrc`, before any `bundle` declarations. It takes no arguments. ## bundle-theme Used for switching the prompt theme. Invoke it with the name of the theme you want to use. bundle-theme fox Currently, themes are pulled from robbyrussell's oh-my-zsh repo, but it will support getting themes from other repos as well in the future. ## bundle-apply 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 and your shell will start noticeably slow if you have a good number of bundle specifications. However, if you're a zsh expert and 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. # Configuration The following environment variables can be set to customize the behavior of antigen. Make sure you set them *before* sourceing `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. `ANTIGEN_REPO_CACHE` — This is where the cloned repositories are cached. Defaults to `$HOME/.antigen/cache` `ANTIGEN_BUNDLE_DIR` — This is where the plugins are installed and sourced from. Defaults to `$HOME/.antigen/bundles` # Meta Please note that I built this over night and should be considered very alpha. However, I am using it full time now on my work machine. Project 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 join the discussion on the [reddit page][] of this project. [Vundle]: https://github.com/gmarik/vundle [oh-my-zsh]: https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh [issue]: https://github.com/sharat87/antigen/issues [reddit page]: http://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/u4f26/antigen_a_plugin_manager_for_zsh_shell/