A shell plugin manager written in Golang.
Antibody can manage plugins for shells (zsh
, for example), both loading them
with source
or export
-ing them to PATH
, for example.
Why?
I was using Antigen before. It is a good plugin manager, but at the same time
it's bloated and slow - 5+ seconds to load on my Mac... that's way too
much to wait for a prompt to load!
Antigen is focused in performance, and, since v2.0.0, manage more than just
ZSH plugins, but also PATH plugins (those project with binaries) and it is easy
enough to implement it for Fish and others.
I'm aware that there are other attempts, like
antigen-hs, but I don't want to
install a lot of stuff for this to work.
Why Go
Well, the compiled Go program runs anywhere and doesn't depend on any shared
libraries. I also don't need to source it as it would be necessary with
plain simple shell. I also can do stuff in parallel with Go routines.
What works
These are the only antigen commands I ever used:
Antibody does just those three things, but you don't even need to apply
.
Running antibody bundle
will already download and apply the given bundle.
antibody home
also shows where the repositories are being downloaded.
What doesn't work
- The
theme
command (although most themes might just work with bundle
);
- oh-my-zsh support: it looks very ugly to me and I won't do it;
Install
The simplest way to install Antibody is to run:
$ curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/getantibody/installer/master/install | bash -s
$ echo 'source <(antibody init)' >> ~/.zshrc
This will put the binary in /usr/local/bin/antibody
and setup your ~/.zshrc
to load what is needed on startup.
Usage
Now, you can just antibody bundle
stuff, e.g.,
antibody bundle caarlos0/jvm
. The repository will be cloned at
your OS cache folder (check antibody home
) folder.
The ZSH bundle implementation will try to load files that match:
*.plugin.zsh
*.zsh
*.sh
*.zsh-theme
The Path bundle implementation will just add the folder to your PATH
.
You can change the impl by adding kind:zsh
or kind:path
to the argument, as
in antibody bundle 'caarlos0/ports kind:path'
You can also specify a branch to download, for example,
antibody bundle caarlos0/jvm branch:v2
will download the v2
branch of that
repository.
When you decide to update your bundles, just run antibody update
: it will
update all bundles inside the antibody home
folder.
Protips
Prefer to use it like this:
$ cat plugins.txt
caarlos0/jvm
caarlos0/ports kind:path
djui/alias-tips
caarlos0/zsh-mkc
zsh-users/zsh-completions
caarlos0/zsh-open-github-pr
zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting
zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search
$ antibody bundle < plugins.txt
This way antibody can concurrently clone the bundles and find return the shell
line, so it will probably be faster than call each one separately.
In the wild
Static loading
You can use antibody in a static-loading manner (so you don't need to exec
antibody every time you open a shell).
$ antibody bundle < bundles.txt >> sourceables.sh
# In your zshrc (or whatever):
$ source sourceables.sh
Beware that antibody does stuff in parallel, so bundle order is not guaranteed.
PS: since v2.0.0, this is the default behavior.
Thanks