zsh antigen

Manage zsh the intelligent way.

Quick Setup

When I first connect to a new system, this single block does everything in one paste: installs antigen, writes the .zshrc below, and makes zsh the shell that launches automatically whenever bash starts an interactive session (without touching the account’s actual login shell).

curl -L git.io/antigen > ~/antigen.zsh &&
cat > ~/.zshrc <<'EOF'
source ~/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 docker
antigen bundle docker-compose
antigen bundle command-not-found

# Syntax highlighting bundle.
antigen bundle zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting

# Load the theme.
antigen theme ys

# autosuggest
antigen bundle zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
source ~/.antigen/bundles/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zsh

# autocorrect
setopt correct

# Tell Antigen that you're done.
antigen apply
EOF
zsh -c 'source ~/antigen.zsh; antigen use oh-my-zsh; antigen bundle zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting; antigen bundle zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions; antigen apply' &&
mkdir -p ~/.antigen/bundles/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/cache/completions
grep -qF 'exec zsh' ~/.bashrc || awk '
/^esac$/ && seen_case {
    print
    print ""
    print "if [[ $- == *i* ]] && command -v zsh >/dev/null 2>&1; then"
    print "    exec zsh"
    print "fi"
    next
}
/^case \$- in$/ { seen_case=1 }
{ print }
' ~/.bashrc > ~/.bashrc.tmp &&
mv ~/.bashrc.tmp ~/.bashrc

The zsh -c and mkdir lines after the .zshrc are there to avoid two errors on the very first start. The first one is this, which comes from the docker plugins trying to write their completions into a cache directory that doesn’t exist yet:

(anon):12: process substitution failed: no such file or directory

The fix is to create ~/.antigen/bundles/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/cache/completions, but the order matters. Antigen only clones oh-my-zsh if its directory is missing, so creating that folder before antigen has run makes it think oh-my-zsh is already installed, and it never gets cloned. The zsh -c line lets antigen do its cloning first (it also fetches the syntax-highlighting and autosuggestions bundles), and only then is the mkdir run. That also removes the other first-run complaint, where the source line for zsh-autosuggestions.zsh fails because the bundle hasn’t been downloaded yet. Both lines are safe to run again.

The awk at the end is doing the fiddly part: it finds the case $- in ... esac block that most distros’ default .bashrc uses to check whether the shell is interactive, and inserts the exec zsh right after it closes — so it only fires for interactive sessions, not when bash is invoked non-interactively (scp, rsync, some CI runners, etc., which would break if a shell startup file suddenly printed anything or exec’d into zsh unconditionally). The grep -qF guard makes it safe to paste more than once without duplicating the block.

Install

curl -L git.io/antigen > ~/antigen.zsh

Configure

~/.zshrc

source ~/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 docker
antigen bundle docker-compose
antigen bundle command-not-found

# Syntax highlighting bundle.
antigen bundle zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting

# Load the theme.
antigen theme ys

# autosuggest
antigen bundle zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
source ~/.antigen/bundles/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zsh

# autocorrect
setopt correct

# Tell Antigen that you're done.
antigen apply