unixorn / antigen-hs

A fast zsh plugin manager

antigen-hs

A replacement for antigen which has a low overhead when starting up the shell. I created this plugin because I realized that antigen were the main cause of slow zsh startup times. After the switch, I went from a loading time of 1.00 seconds to less than 0.10 seconds (wall clock).

The performance improvement is achieved by generating a shell script consisting of commands to source your plugin scripts. The script contains full absolute paths of your plugins scripts. In antigen, the paths are calculated every time a new shell is opened.

Installing

Since this plugin is not entirely written in zsh (unlike antigen), it has a few more installation steps. In addition to this README, check out this diff to my dotfiles repository where I replace antigen with antigen-hs.

Haskell and packages

Since this plugin is written in Haskell, you have to download it:

sudo apt-get install ghc cabal-install

The code also depends on the Shelly Haskell library:

cabal update
cabal install shelly

Clone and source

This plugin assumes that you put it in ~/.zsh/antigen-hs/:

git clone . ~/.zsh/antigen-hs/

Then source it from you zshrc:

echo 'source ~/.zsh/antigen-hs/init.zsh' >> ~/.zshrc

Create plugins file

touch ~/.zsh/MyAntigen.hs
vim ~/.zsh/MyAntigen.hs

And paste this example content

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
{-# LANGUAGE ExtendedDefaultRules #-}
module MyAntigen where

import Antigen (
                -- Rudimentary imports
                AntigenConfiguration (..)
              , bundle
              , antigen
                -- If you want to source a bit trickier plugins
              , ZshPlugin (..)
              , antigenSourcingStrategy
              , filePathsSourcingStrategy
              )
import Shelly (shelly)

bundles =
  [ bundle "Tarrasch/zsh-functional"
  , bundle "Tarrasch/zsh-bd"
  , bundle "zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting"
  , bundle "zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search"

  -- If you use a plugin that doesn't have a *.plugin.zsh file. You can set a
  -- more liberal sourcing strategy.
  --
  -- , (bundle "some/stupid-plugin") { sourcingStrategy = antigenSourcingStrategy }

  -- If you use a plugin that has sub-plugins. You can specify that as well
  --
  -- NOTE: If you want to use oh-my-zsh for real (please don't), you still need
  -- to set the $ZSH env var manually.
  -- , (bundle "robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh")
  --    { sourcingLocations = [ "plugins/wd"
  --                          , "plugins/colorize"] }

  -- Sourcing a list of files
  -- , (bundle "alfredodeza/zsh-plugins")
  --    { sourcingStrategy = filePathsSourcingStrategy
  --                          [ "vi/zle_vi_visual.zsh"
  --                          , "pytest/pytest.plugin.zsh"
  --                          ] }

  -- Alternatively, this way will give you the same result
  -- , (bundle "alfredodeza/zsh-plugins")
  --    { sourcingStrategy = antigenSourcingStrategy
  --    , sourcingLocations = [ "vi"
  --                          , "pytest"
  --                          ] }

  -- vvv    Add your plugins here    vvv
  ]

config = AntigenConfiguration bundles

main :: IO ()
main = shelly $ antigen config

Now edit this file accordingly by adding your own plugins. Then you're done! You can get some inspiration from the author's ~/.zsh/MyAntigen.hs.

Usage

Reload your shell, execute antigen-hs-compile and reload zsh once more. Each time you update MyAntigen.hs you have to run antigen-hs-compile

Limitations

The antigen plugin does way more than it should (just look at its bloated command list). This plugin tries to be minimal, if you are enough experienced with computers to use a zsh plugin manager, you can delete and manage the repositories in ~/.antigen-hs/repos manually yourself!

Configuration

The following variables alter the behavior of antigen-hs, and must be set before sourcing init.zsh:

ANTIGEN_HS_HOME # This is only set automatically, and is set to the location
                # of the antigen-hs repository (which by default is
                # $HOME/.zsh/antigen-hs)
ANTIGEN_HS_OUT  # Output directory for cloned repositories and generated
                # scripts, defaults to $HOME/.antigen-hs.
ANTIGEN_HS_MY   # Your configuration file, defaults to
                # $ANTIGEN_HS_HOME/../MyAntigen.hs

FAQ

Is Prezto or oh-my-zsh supported in some way? No, if you load them they will be treated like any other plugin. Remember that those two basically are just bundles of plugins, I recommend against using them because one should load the individual plugins through a plugin manager like antigen or antigen-hs. If there's anything inside those plugins that you want, just create a seperate repository for it like I did.

Why do I get No *.plugin.zsh file error? Because all zsh plugins should have that file. I want to enforce it so that people start following this convention. The easiest way is to just fork the plugin you want and/or make them change it If you're interested in some discussion about this, take a look at Tarrasch#3 and zsh-users/antigen#23.

What is the relationship of antigen-hs with antigen? antigen-hs can achieve 100% of antigen if the user is just willing to spend some time doing things right (like not using plugin bundles like oh-my-zsh). In reward they don't need to use software that is bloated. To be fair, many (including my good github friend @sharat87) might want to say that antigen is more featureful/convenient, not bloated. I'll let you choose side yourself. :)

What about the antigen commands like theme and others? I do not found them useful or stable so I rather not have them. I rather rely on my own zsh fu when it comes to choirs like updating the repositories (nuking the ~/.antigen-hs folder) than relying on some shaky commands of antigen.

Can I only source GitHub repositories? At the moment yes, patches are very welcome! :)

Why not write it in pure zsh? Trust me , it is a horrible language.

Why Haskell? I love it, and I found the Shelly plugin to work extremely well for this kind of tasks.