antidote

Get the cure

Meet antidote, a feature-complete Zsh implementation of the legacy Antibody plugin manager, which in turn was derived from Antigen. It not only aims to provide continuity for those legacy plugin managers, but also to delight new users with high-performance, easy-to-use Zsh plugin management.

Usage

Basic usage should look really familiar to you if you have used antibody or antigen. Bundles (aka: Zsh plugins) are stored in a file typically called .zsh_plugins.txt.

# .zsh_plugins.txt
rupa/z              # some bash plugins work too
sindresorhus/pure   # enhance your prompt

# you can even use Oh My Zsh plugins
getantidote/use-omz
ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh path:lib
ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh path:plugins/extract

# add fish-like features
zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting
zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search

A typical .zshrc might then look like:

# .zshrc
source /path-to-antidote/antidote.zsh
antidote load ${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.zsh_plugins.txt

The full documentation can be found at https://antidote.sh.

Help getting started

If you want to see a full-featured example Zsh configuration using antidote, you can have a look at this example zdotdir project. Feel free to incorporate code or plugins from it into your own dotfiles, or you can fork it to get started building your own Zsh config from scratch driven by antidote.

Installation

Install with git

You can install the latest release of antidote by cloning it with git:

# first, run this from an interactive zsh terminal session:
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/mattmc3/antidote.git ${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.antidote

Install with a package manager

antidote may also be available in your system's package manager:

• macOS homebrew: brew install antidote
• Arch AUR: yay -S zsh-antidote
• Nix Home-Manager : programs.zsh.antidote.enable = true;

Performance

antidote supports ultra-high performance plugin loads using a static plugin file. It also allows deferred loading for plugins that support it.

# .zsh_plugins.txt
# some plugins support deferred loading
zdharma-continuum/fast-syntax-highlighting kind:defer
zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions kind:defer
zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search kind:defer

# .zshrc
# Lazy-load antidote and generate the static load file only when needed
zsh_plugins=${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.zsh_plugins
if [[ ! ${zsh_plugins}.zsh -nt ${zsh_plugins}.txt ]]; then
  (
    source /path-to-antidote/antidote.zsh
    antidote bundle <${zsh_plugins}.txt >${zsh_plugins}.zsh
  )
fi
source ${zsh_plugins}.zsh

bat syntax highlighting

If you use bat, antidote includes a syntax definition for .zsh_plugins.txt files. To install it:

bat_syntax_dir="$(bat --config-dir)/syntaxes"
mkdir -p "$bat_syntax_dir"
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mattmc3/antidote/main/misc/zsh_plugins.sublime-syntax \
  -o "$bat_syntax_dir/zsh_plugins.sublime-syntax"
bat cache --build

Benchmarks

You can see how antidote compares with other setups here.

Plugin authors

If you authored a Zsh plugin, the recommended snippet for antidote is:

antidote install gh_user/gh_repo

If your plugin is hosted somewhere other than GitHub, you can use this:

antidote install https://bitbucket.org/bb_user/bb_repo

Credits

A big thank you to Carlos for all his work on antibody over the years.