A lightweight plugin manager for ZSH inspired by Antigen. The goal is to have a minimal overhead when starting up the shell because nobody likes waiting. The script generates a static init.zsh file which does nothing but sources your plugins and appends them to fpath. The downside is that you have to refresh the init script manually with zgen reset whenever you update your .zshrc.

zgen oh-my-zsh

zgen oh-my-zsh <location>

This is a shortcut for zgen load.

zgen load <repo> [location] [branch]

Similar to antigen bundle. It tries to source any scripts from location. If none found, it adds location to $fpath.

• repo
  • github 'user/repository' or path to a local repository
• location
  • relative path to a script/folder
  • useful for repositories that don't have proper plugin support like zsh-users/zsh-completions
• branch
  • for those who don't use the master branch

zgen save

We do this so they'll get run each time you source zgen.

zgen reset

You must do this every time you tweak your .zshrc so that the new plugins can be saved to an init script.

zgen saved

Returns 0 if an init script exists.

zgen selfupdate

zgen update

You can set the environment variable ZGEN_RESET_ON_CHANGE. These files will be checked and if a change is detected zgen reset is called. ZGEN_RESET_ON_CHANGE=(${HOME}/.zshrc ${HOME}/.zshrc.local)

# load zgen
source "${HOME}/proj/zgen/zgen.zsh"

# check if there's no init script
if ! zgen saved; then
    echo "Creating a zgen save"

    zgen oh-my-zsh

    # plugins
    zgen oh-my-zsh plugins/git
    zgen oh-my-zsh plugins/sudo
    zgen oh-my-zsh plugins/command-not-found
    zgen load zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting
    zgen load /path/to/super-secret-private-plugin

    # bulk load
    zgen loadall <<EOPLUGINS
        zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search
        /path/to/local/plugin
EOPLUGINS
    # ^ can't indent this EOPLUGINS

    # completions
    zgen load zsh-users/zsh-completions src

    # theme
    zgen oh-my-zsh themes/arrow

    # save all to init script
    zgen save
fi

The awesome-zsh-plugins list contains many zgen-compatible zsh plugins & themes that you may find useful.