Introduction

Antibody is a shell plugin manager made from the ground up thinking about performance.

It is faster because it can do things concurrently, while Antigen does it sequentially. It also has the advantage of using a compiled language instead of a scripting one.

You can see it working in the below example:

How much faster?

Let’s see how much faster antibody is over antigen:

Data from getantibody/speed repository.

Make it even faster

Antibody is faster than other zsh package managers, but you might want to speed it up further.

Highly recommended to read the following:

Speeding up my ZSH load - Carlos Alexandro Becker: outlines a few fixes that will speed up the prompt massively. Also explains how to debug your prompt load time.
Speed up zsh compinit by only checking cache once a day.: mentioned in the previous link, but leaving this here for reference as it is helpful for anyone using zsh.
How to debug zsh startup time — JB on programming 1.0.0 documentation

Compatibility

Since antibody started as a subset clone of antigen, one might wonder how compatible one is with another. Let’s take a look.

Antibody can only bundle and update plugins. The apply command is not needed because running antibody bundle will already download and apply the given plugin.

The theme command is not implemented. You can just use bundle instead.

oh-my-zsh plugins are supported by using the path annotation:

antibody bundle ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh path:plugins/aws

Install

Antibody can be installed through a variety of sources.

The simplest way is to run:

curl -sfL git.io/antibody | sh -s - -b /usr/local/bin

This will put the binary in /usr/local/bin/antibody

You can also use homebrew (on macOS):

brew install antibody

Or even using AUR on Arch Linux.

You can also always download and install manually via tar.gz archives or using dpkg and our deb archives. Just head to the releases page and chose your poison.

Usage

There are mainly two ways of using antibody: static and dynamic. We will also see how we can keep a plugins file.

Plugins file

A plugin file is basically any text file that has one plugin per line.

In our examples, let’s assume we have a ~/.zsh_plugins.txt with these contents:

caarlos0/jvm
djui/alias-tips
# comments are supported like this
caarlos0/zsh-mkc
zsh-users/zsh-completions
caarlos0/zsh-open-github-pr

# empty lines are skipped

# annotations are also allowed:
ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh path:plugins/aws

zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting
zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search

That being said, let’s look how can we load them!

Dynamic loading

This is the most common way. Basically, every time the a new shell starts, antibody will apply the plugins given to it.

For this to work, antibody needs to be wrapped into your ~/.zshrc. To do that, run:

# ~/.zshrc
source <(antibody init)

And reload your current shell or open a new one.

Then, you will also need to tell antibody which plugins to bundle. This can also be done in the ~/.zshrc file:

# ~/.zshrc
antibody bundle < ~/.zsh_plugins.txt

Static loading

This is the faster alternative. Basically, you’ll run antibody only when you change your plugins, and then you can just load the “static” plugins file.

Note that in this case, we should not put antibody init on our ~/.zshrc. If you did that already, remove it from your ~/.zshrc and start a fresh terminal session.

Assuming the same ~/.zsh_plugins.txt as before, we can run:

antibody bundle < ~/.zsh_plugins.txt > ~/.zsh_plugins.sh

At any time to update our ~/.zsh_plugins.sh file. Now, we just need to source that file on ~/.zshrc:

# ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zsh_plugins.sh

And that’s it!

CleanMyMac and others

If you use CleanMyMac or similar tools, make sure to set it up to ignore the antibody home folder, otherwise it may delete your plugins.

You may also change Antibody’s home folder, for example:

export ANTIBODY_HOME=~/Libary/antibody

Options

There are a few options you can use that should cover most common use cases. Let’s take a look!

Kind

The kind annotation can be used to determine how a bundle should be treated.

zsh

The default is kind:zsh, which will look for files that match these globs:

*.plugin.zsh
*.zsh
*.sh
*.zsh-theme

And source them.

Example:

$ antibody bundle caarlos0/jvm kind:zsh
source /Users/carlos/Library/Caches/antibody/https-COLON--SLASH--SLASH-github.com-SLASH-caarlos0-SLASH-jvm/jvm.plugin.zsh

path

The kind:path mode will just put the plugin folder in your $PATH.

Example:

$ antibody bundle caarlos0/ports kind:path
export PATH="/Users/carlos/Library/Caches/antibody/https-COLON--SLASH--SLASH-github.com-SLASH-caarlos0-SLASH-ports:$PATH"

fpath

The kind:fpath only puts the plugin folder on the fpath, doing nothing else. It can be specially useful for completion scripts that won’t allow to be sourced.

Example:

$ antibody bundle Linuxbrew/brew path:completions/zsh kind:fpath
fpath+=( /Users/carlos/Library/Caches/antibody/https-COLON--SLASH--SLASH-github.com-SLASH-Linuxbrew-SLASH-brew/completions/zsh )

clone

The kind:clone only gets the plugin, doing nothing else. It can be useful for managing a package that isn’t directly used as a shell plugin.

Example:

$ antibody bundle mbadolato/iTerm2-Color-Schemes kind:clone

Branch

You can also specify a branch to download, if you don’t want the master branch for whatever reason.

Example:

$ antibody bundle caarlos0/jvm branch:v2
source /Users/carlos/Library/Caches/antibody/https-COLON--SLASH--SLASH-github.com-SLASH-caarlos0-SLASH-jvm/jvm.plugin.zsh

Path

You may specify a subfolder or a specific file if the repo you are bundling contains multiple plugins.

Example:

$ antibody bundle ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh path:plugins/aws
source /Users/carlos/Library/Caches/antibody/https-COLON--SLASH--SLASH-github.com-SLASH-ohmyzsh-SLASH-ohmyzsh/plugins/aws/aws.plugin.zsh
fpath+=( /Users/carlos/Library/Caches/antibody/https-COLON--SLASH--SLASH-github.com-SLASH-ohmyzsh-SLASH-ohmyzsh/plugins/aws )

If you want multiple paths within from the same plugin, you can just repeat the plugin with a different path option:

$ antibody bundle "ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh path:plugins/aws/aws.plugin.zsh
  ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh path:plugins/asdf"
source /Users/carlos/Library/Caches/antibody/https-COLON--SLASH--SLASH-github.com-SLASH-ohmyzsh-SLASH-ohmyzsh/plugins/aws/aws.plugin.zsh
fpath+=( /Users/carlos/Library/Caches/antibody/https-COLON--SLASH--SLASH-github.com-SLASH-ohmyzsh-SLASH-ohmyzsh/plugins/aws )
source /Users/carlos/Library/Caches/antibody/https-COLON--SLASH--SLASH-github.com-SLASH-ohmyzsh-SLASH-ohmyzsh/plugins/asdf/asdf.plugin.zsh
fpath+=( /Users/carlos/Library/Caches/antibody/https-COLON--SLASH--SLASH-github.com-SLASH-ohmyzsh-SLASH-ohmyzsh/plugins/asdf )

Outro

Let’s look what other commands antibody has available for us!

Update

Antibody can update all bundles in a single pass.

Just run:

$ antibody update
Updating all bundles in /Users/carlos/Library/Caches/antibody...

and that’s it.

Purge

You can remove a bundle completely by purging it:

$ antibody purge ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh
Removing ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh...

List

If you want to see what plugins you have in your home folder, you can of course list them:

$ antibody list
https://github.com/Tarrasch/zsh-bd            /Users/carlos/Library/Caches/antibody/https-COLON--SLASH--SLASH-github.com-SLASH-Tarrasch-SLASH-zsh-bd
https://github.com/caarlos0/git-add-remote    /Users/carlos/Library/Caches/antibody/https-COLON--SLASH--SLASH-github.com-SLASH-caarlos0-SLASH-git-add-remote
# ...

Path

You can see the path being used for a cloned bundle.

$ antibody path ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh
/Users/carlos/Library/Caches/antibody/https-COLON--SLASH--SLASH-github.com-SLASH-ohmyzsh-SLASH-ohmyzsh

This is particularly useful for projects like oh-my-zsh that rely on storing its path in the $ZSH environment variable:

$ ZSH=$(antibody path ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh)

Home

You can also see where antibody is keeping the plugins with the home command:

$ antibody home
/Users/carlos/Library/Caches/antibody

Of course, you can remove the entire thing with:

rm -rf `antibody home`

if you decide to start fresh or to use something else.