antidote
Meet antidote, a feature-complete Zsh implementation of the legacy Antibody plugin manager, which in turn was derived from Antigen. It not only aims to provide continuity for those legacy plugin managers, but also to delight new users with high-performance, easy-to-use Zsh plugin management.
Usage
Basic usage should look really familiar to you if you have used antibody or antigen.
Bundles (aka: Zsh plugins) are stored in a file typically called .zsh_plugins.txt.
# .zsh_plugins.txt rupa/z # some bash plugins work too sindresorhus/pure # enhance your prompt # you can even use Oh My Zsh plugins getantidote/use-omz ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh path:lib ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh path:plugins/extract # add fish-like features zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search
A typical .zshrc might then look like:
# .zshrc source /path-to-antidote/antidote.zsh antidote load ${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.zsh_plugins.txt
The full documentation can be found at https://antidote.sh.
Help getting started
If you want to see a full-featured example Zsh configuration using antidote, you can have a look at this example zdotdir project. Feel free to incorporate code or plugins from it into your own dotfiles, or you can fork it to get started building your own Zsh config from scratch driven by antidote.
Installation
Install with git
You can install the latest release of antidote by cloning it with git:
# first, run this from an interactive zsh terminal session: git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/mattmc3/antidote.git ${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.antidote
Install with a package manager
antidote may also be available in your system's package manager:
- macOS homebrew:
brew install antidote - Arch AUR:
yay -S zsh-antidote - Nix Home-Manager :
programs.zsh.antidote.enable = true;
Performance
antidote supports ultra-high performance plugin loads using a static plugin file. It also allows deferred loading for plugins that support it.
# .zsh_plugins.txt # some plugins support deferred loading zdharma-continuum/fast-syntax-highlighting kind:defer zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions kind:defer zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search kind:defer
# .zshrc # Lazy-load antidote and generate the static load file only when needed zsh_plugins=${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.zsh_plugins if [[ ! ${zsh_plugins}.zsh -nt ${zsh_plugins}.txt ]]; then ( source /path-to-antidote/antidote.zsh antidote bundle <${zsh_plugins}.txt >${zsh_plugins}.zsh ) fi source ${zsh_plugins}.zsh
bat syntax highlighting
If you use bat, antidote includes a syntax definition
for .zsh_plugins.txt files. To install it:
bat_syntax_dir="$(bat --config-dir)/syntaxes" mkdir -p "$bat_syntax_dir" curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mattmc3/antidote/main/misc/zsh_plugins.sublime-syntax \ -o "$bat_syntax_dir/zsh_plugins.sublime-syntax" bat cache --build
Benchmarks
You can see how antidote compares with other setups here.
Plugin authors
If you authored a Zsh plugin, the recommended snippet for antidote is:
antidote install gh_user/gh_repo
If your plugin is hosted somewhere other than GitHub, you can use this:
antidote install https://bitbucket.org/bb_user/bb_repo
Credits
A big thank you to Carlos for all his work on antibody over the years.