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Antigen is a small set of functions that help you easily manage your shell (zsh) plugins, called bundles. The concept is pretty much the same as bundles in a typical vim+pathogen setup. Antigen is to zsh, what Vundle is to vim.

Antigen has reached a certain level of stability and has been used in the wild for around a couple of years. If you face any problems, please open an issue.

Antigen works with zsh versions >= 4.3.11.

Install Antigen from our main repository with the latest stable version available:

curl -L git.io/antigen > antigen.zsh
# or use git.io/antigen-nightly for the latest version

There are several installation methods using your System Package manager, just look at the Installation wiki page.

Now you may head towards the Commands and Configuration wiki pages to further understand Antigen's functionallity and customization.

The usage should be very familiar to you if you use Vundle. A typical .zshrc might look like this:

source /path-to-antigen/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

Open your zsh with this .zshrc and you should see all the bundles you defined here, getting installed. Once it's done, you are ready to roll. The complete syntax for the antigen bundle command is discussed in the Commands page.

Furthermore, In the wild wiki section has more configuration examples. You may as well take a look at the Show off wiki page for interactive mode usage.

If you use zsh and oh-my-zsh, you know that having many different plugins that are developed by many different authors in a single (sub)repo is not very easy to maintain. There are some really fantastic plugins and utilities in oh-my-zsh, but having them all in a single repo doesn't really scale well. And I admire robbyrussell's efforts for reviewing and merging the gigantic number of pull requests the project gets. We need a better way of plugin management.

This was discussed on a few issues, but it doesn't look like there was any progress made. So, I'm trying to start this off with Antigen, hoping to better this situation. Please note that I'm by no means a zsh or any shell script expert (far from it).

Inspired by vundle, Antigen can pull oh-my-zsh style plugins from various github repositories. You are not limited to use plugins from the oh-my-zsh repository only and you don't need to maintain your own fork and pull from upstream every now and then. I actually encourage you to grab plugins and scripts from various sources, straight from the authors, before they even submit it to oh-my-zsh as a pull request.

Antigen also lets you switch the prompt theme with one command, just like that

antigen theme candy

and your prompt is changed, just for this session of course (unless you put this line in your .zshrc).

We are always looking for new contributors! We have a number of issues marked as "Help wanted" that are good places to jump in and get started. Take a look at our Roadmap to see future projects and discuss ideas.

Please be sure to check out our Contributing guidelines to understand our workflow, and our Coding conventions.

Any comments/suggestions/feedback is truly welcome. Please say hello to us on Gitter. Or open an issue to discuss something (anything!) about the project ;).

There are many articles written by Antigen users out there. Be sure to check them out in the Articles page.

The awesome-zsh-plugins list is a directory of plugins, themes and alternatives that you may find useful.