Get the cure

Antidote is a feature-complete Zsh implementation of the legacy Antibody plugin manager, which in turn was derived from Antigen. Antidote 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.

The planned upcoming 2.0 release will stop defaulting to compatibility with antibody. If maintaining compatibility with antibody is important to you, you can ensure that your config remains compatible by add the following zstyle to your config now, before the 2.0 release goes live:

zstyle ':antidote:compatibility-mode' 'antibody' 'on'

Breaking compatibility by default will allow antidote to continue to grow and gain new features, as well as fix some long-standing issues that have always been present in antibody, for example:

• In 2.0, fpath can be fully set at the beginning of your bundles in you static file, making setting up completion bundles properly way easier and less frustrating (#74, #144).
• bundles will no longer default to using fugly directory names ($ANTIDOTE_HOME/https-COLON--SLASH--SLASH-github.com-SLASH-foo-SLASH-bar), making zstyle ':antidote:bundle' use-friendly-names on obsolete.
• probably some other minor deviations as well

Just to be clear, if you don't specifically care about backwards compatibility with antibody, you do not need to change a thing. 2.x will not break your 1.x antidote config. If you do care, be sure to add the compatibility mode zstyle above to your config now, before the 2.0 release.

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.

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.

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

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;

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

You can see how antidote compares with other setups here.

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

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