zsh-utils

A set of modules designed to be easy to use with plugin managers

Why Another Framework?

After spending quite a bit of my time maintaining prezto, there were a number of main problems I noticed:

• Most zsh config frameworks contain a collection of modules along with a plugin manager. Most bundled plugin managers are fairly minimal. Existing plugin managers could be used because the plugins themselves contain the bulk of framework code.
• It takes a ton of work to get a module ready for prezto, even small modules.
• Too many options.
• A number of the behaviors in prezto do strange things and set up rather odd defaults.
• Many plugins end up being a small wrapper around an external repo

That being said, there are a number of strengths to configuration frameworks as well.

• Plugins work well together. As an example, prezto's git plugin provides a git-info command which can be used by prompts.
• Having a number of plugins bundled together in one place makes it simple to enable the ones you want without having to do too much additional work.

This project aims to solve some of the problems faces by larger frameworks by focusing on the following goals:

• Loadable by any compatible plugin manager
• Plugins will be kept small, relatively inflexible, and well organized
• No external dependencies without very good reason
• Focus on improving the existing experience rather than expanding it

Recommended Installation

Personally, I recommend antigen, but it should be possible to load with other plugin managers like zgen or zplug as well.

The following example can be placed in your .zshrc and will install antigen if it's missing, load antigen, install the zsh-utils repo, and load any specified plugins.

[[ ! -d "$HOME/.antigen" ]] && git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/antigen.git "$HOME/.antigen"
source "$HOME/.antigen/antigen.zsh"

# Set the default plugin repo to be zsh-utils
antigen use belak/zsh-utils

# Specify completions we want before the completion module
antigen bundle zsh-users/zsh-completions

# Specify plugins we want
antigen bundle editor
antigen bundle history
antigen bundle prompt
antigen bundle utility
antigen bundle completion

# Specify external plugins we want
antigen bundle zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting

# Load everything
antigen apply

# Set any settings or overrides here
prompt belak
bindkey -e

Provided Plugins

completion

Load and initialize the built-in zsh completion system. Note that this does not include any additional completions. If you're looking for improved completion support, the excellent zsh-completions repo is strongly recommended. Note that it should be loaded before the completion module.

editor

Override and fill in the gaps of the default emacs and vi-mode keybinds. Note that this resets to the default keymap. To switch to emacs or vi-mode, call bindkey -e or bindkey -v after loading.

history

Load and initilize the built-in zsh history system.

prompt

Load and initialize the build-in zsh prompt system. This also provides a number of additional prompts. Note that in order to actually set your prompt, you must call prompt <prompt name>

utility

Common shell utilities, aimed at making cross platform work less painful.