oh-my-zsh is an open source, community-driven framework for managing your ZSH configuration. It comes bundled with a ton of helpful functions, helpers, plugins, themes, and few things that make you shout…

“OH MY ZSHELL!”

Setup

oh-my-zsh should work with any recent release of zsh, the minimum recommended version is 4.3.9.
If not already, install zsh using the command line first.

The automatic installer… (do you trust me?)

You can install this via the command line with either curl or wget.

via curl

curl -L http://install.ohmyz.sh | sh

via wget

wget --no-check-certificate http://install.ohmyz.sh -O - | sh

Optional: change the install directory

The default location is ~/.oh-my-zsh (hidden in your home directory).

You can change the install directory with the ZSH environment variable, either
by running export ZSH=/your/path before installing, or setting it before the
end of the install pipeline like this:

curl -L https://raw.github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh | ZSH=~/.dotfiles/zsh sh

The manual way

1. Clone the repository

git clone git://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh.git ~/.oh-my-zsh

2. OPTIONAL Backup your existing ~/.zshrc file

cp ~/.zshrc ~/.zshrc.orig

3. Create a new zsh config by copying the zsh template we’ve provided.

cp ~/.oh-my-zsh/templates/zshrc.zsh-template ~/.zshrc

4. Set zsh as your default shell:

chsh -s /bin/zsh

5. Start / restart zsh (open a new terminal is easy enough…)

Problems?

You might need to modify your PATH in ~/.zshrc if you’re not able to find some commands after switching to Oh My Zsh.

If you installed manually or changed the install location, check ZSH in ~/.zshrc

Usage

• enable the plugins you want in your ~/.zshrc (take a look at the plugins/ directory and the wiki to see what’s possible)
  • example: plugins=(git osx ruby)
• Theme support: Change the ZSH_THEME environment variable in ~/.zshrc.
  • Take a look at the current themes that come bundled with Oh My Zsh.
• much much more… take a look at lib/ what Oh My Zsh offers…

Useful

the refcard is pretty tasty for tips.

Customization

If you want to override any of the default behavior, just add a new file (ending in .zsh) into the custom/ directory.
If you have many functions which go well together you can put them as a *.plugin.zsh file in the custom/plugins/ directory and then enable this plugin.
If you would like to override the functionality of a plugin distributed with oh-my-zsh, create a plugin of the same name in the custom/plugins/ directory and it will be loaded instead of the one in plugins/.

Updates

By default you will be prompted to check for updates. If you would like oh-my-zsh to automatically update itself without prompting you, set the following in your ~/.zshrc

DISABLE_UPDATE_PROMPT=true

To disable updates entirely, put this in your ~/.zshrc

DISABLE_AUTO_UPDATE=true

To upgrade directly from the command line, just run upgrade_oh_my_zsh

Uninstalling

If you want to uninstall it, just run uninstall_oh_my_zsh from the command line and it’ll remove itself and revert you to bash (or your previous zsh config).

Help out!

I’m far from being a zsh-expert and suspect there are many ways to improve. If you have ideas on how to make the configuration easier to maintain (and faster), don’t hesitate to fork and send pull requests!

(Don’t) Send us your theme! (for now)

I’m hoping to collect a bunch of themes for our command prompts. You can see existing ones in the themes/ directory.

We have enough themes for the time being. Please fork the project and add on in there, you can let people know how to grab it from there.

Contributors

This project wouldn’t exist without all of our awesome users and contributors.

• View our growing list of contributors

Thank you so much!