A guide to install and customize zsh along with different plugins with the help of antigen plugin manager. But what are those?

ZSH and Antigen

ZSH

The Z shell! A Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a command interpreter for shell scripting.

Antigen

Yet, an another plugin manager for zsh!

Antigen’s official docs says,

Why zsh?

Why? We’ve bash, right? Well, you can extend it’s features more easily along with awesome customizations! Do you need anything else?

Z shell’s official website says,

Still confused? Well, just try once, if you don’t like it you can always revert back 😆.

Why antigen?

We’ve got a lot of popular zsh plug-in managers like oh-my-zsh, zplug and so on. So why antigen?

• It’s fast ✨

And I think it’s more easier. 🎯

Installing zsh

You can most probably install right from your operating system’s official package manager. Alternatively, you can check this list, if you need help installing zsh.

To make sure zsh is installed, fire up your terminal and execute,

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zsh --version

Default shell

Whenever you fire up your terminal, do you find zsh? If yes, then zsh is your default shell. Alternatively, run the following command,

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echo $SHELL

If your output is /bin/zsh or /usr/bin/zsh then, zsh is your default shell.

So how do you make zsh your default? run the following command,

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chsh -s $(which zsh)

Don’t have the admin privilege? Check this thread then.

Antigen Installation

Installation

No big deal, just run the following command,

What will this command do? 🧐

Go to your home directory(/home/$USER/), you’ll find a new file, named antigen.zsh. We’ve no business with this file, so let’s forget, it exists in our system 😆.

Believe it or not, antigen is now installed 😅. Now we just have to modify .zshrc file in our home directory. Everything will depend on it! ✨

zshrc file

Now open .zshrc file with our favorite text editor, and prepare for the worst 🎃.

Copy the following lines to your .zshrc file,

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source ~/antigen.zsh

# Load the oh-my-zsh's library.
antigen use oh-my-zsh

# 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

Antigen Usage

understanding zshrc

To make it simple, let’s say whenever you fire up your terminal, whatever zshrc contains will be executed. How kool is that?

That means whatever we’ve added to our .zshrc will also be executed?

• yes

And can we run those lines without using .zshrc?

• yes 👿. But make sure to run source ~/antigen.zsh first. Cause, you know, we’ve installed our antigen to antigen.zsh.

understanding antigen

Now it’s time, let’s see what’ve done so far in .zshrc. We’ve first used this line to show him the location of antigen.

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source ~/antigen.zsh

Then, we’ve loaded oh-my-zsh library (the most popular one for zsh).

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antigen use oh-my-zsh

As we’ve oh-my-zsh now on our hands, who can tell us to stop 😅? Now we can easily load oh-my-zsh bundles using commands like,

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antigen bundle git
antigen bundle heroku
antigen bundle pip
antigen bundle lein
antigen bundle command-not-found

And let’s not forget oh-my-zsh themes. In the above example (.zshrc) we’ve used robbyrussell. And you can change it for sure! check,

• oh-my-zsh themes collection that you can use directly

Let’s say, you want to install the theme, named refined. Then you can modify the .zshrc file and set theme to refined.

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# Load the theme.
antigen theme refined

Plugin installation

Now you may want to install custom antigen plugins from various GitHub repositories. And if you don’t know what to install, here’s a list you can try,

• awesome zsh plugins

zsh auto notify

For now let’s install two most common and interesting plugins! First one is zsh-auto-notify. Whenever a long process is finished you will get a notification through notify-send. Check it’s repository,

• ZSH auto notify

Now how can we install it? Simple! Check the URL of GitHub of this repository. It’s,

https://github.com/MichaelAquilina/zsh-auto-notify

We’ve to collect the username/repository-name. For this case it’s MichaelAquilina/zsh-auto-notify. Then to install it we have to put the following line to our .zshrc,

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antigen bundle MichaelAquilina/zsh-auto-notify

zsh-autosuggestions

Similarly let’s install one more called zsh-autosuggestions. It’s repository’s link is,

https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions

So, to install we’ve to use,

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antigen bundle zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions

Repo with different branch

Did you notice the branch name from GitHub for above two commands. It’s master, right?

If your branch isn’t master, then our command will be little different.

Suppose the branch is main then the command will be like,

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antigen bundle github-user/repo --branch=main

Optimization and plugin settings

Let’s say you’ve installed some plugins to test and then you decided not to use them. So you removed them from .zshrc. But the files?

Did you notice there’s a folder in your home directory now called .antigen? This is where all of your plugin exits. If this folder or directory doesn’t exist then whenever you’ll fire up the terminal, it’ll be automatically be created. So what’ll you do to optimize your space?

• Just delete the directory 🫠.

Now, what about the plugin settings?

• Discover the .antigen directory and you’ll find corresponding plugins. And then I think you can follow along their official documentations!

Uninstallation

To uninstall ZSH, uninstall from your package manager. Then what about antigen? Here antigen isn’t a package. So you can just go to your home directory and remove .antigen directory, .zshrc and other zsh stuff and finally antigen.zsh.

Wrapping up

Now I think, you’ve successfully installed antigen and zsh with a good looking theme. If you’ve messed up or couldn’t follow along, here’s my .zshrc after this tutorial.

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source ~/antigen.zsh

# Load the oh-my-zsh's library.
antigen use oh-my-zsh

# 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 refined

antigen bundle MichaelAquilina/zsh-auto-notify
antigen bundle zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions

# Tell Antigen that you're done.
antigen apply

If you’ve any questions or queries or any doubt, feel free to contact me or maybe our telegram group 😅. And if you don’t like ZSH there is also fish. Maybe I’ll write another one for fish, who knows? 😆

Thanks for reading this far.