antibody

README

antibody

A faster and simpler version of antigen.

"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."

Read more: Antigen.

Why?

Antigen is really nice. But it is bloated and it is slow - 5+ seconds to load on my Mac... that's way too much to wait for a prompt to load!

I'm aware that there is other attempts, like antigen-hs, but I'm don't want to install a lot of stuff for this to work.

So, why Go, you might ask.

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. The little amount of shell written is needed because I can't source something from inside a Go program (or at least don't yet know how to do it).

What works

These are only antigen commands I ever used:

• bundle
• update
• apply

Antibody does just those three things, but you don't even need to apply. Running antibody bundle will already apply the bundle given bundle.

What doesn't work

• Modules without a *.plugin.zsh file;
• Modules that are not in GitHub (you can open a PR if you wish);
• The theme command (although some themes might just work with bundle);
• oh-my-zsh support: it looks very ugly to me and I won't do it;

Usage

• Download the last release;
• Uncompress it somewhere;
• source antibody.zsh.

Now, you can just antibody bundle stuff, e.g., antibody bundle Tarrasch/zsh-autoenv. The repository will be cloned at ~/.antibody and all .zsh.plugin files will be loaded.

If you ever need to update your bundles, just run antibody update.

Protips

Prefer to use it like this:

$ cat plugins.txt
caarlos0/jvm
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, so it may be faster!

In the wild

• I did this mostly for myself, so, my dotfiles;