Oh My Zsh is an open source, community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration.

Sounds boring. Let's try again.

Oh My Zsh will not make you a 10x developer...but you might feel like one.

Once installed, your terminal shell will become the talk of the town or your money back! With each keystroke in your command prompt, you'll take advantage of the hundreds of powerful plugins and beautiful themes. Strangers will come up to you in cafés and ask you, "that is amazing! are you some sort of genius?"

Finally, you'll begin to get the sort of attention that you have always felt you deserved. ...or maybe you'll use the time that you're saving to start flossing more often. 😬

To learn more, visit ohmyz.sh and follow @ohmyzsh on Twitter.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

Disclaimer: Oh My Zsh works best on macOS and Linux.

• Unix-like operating system (macOS or Linux)
• Zsh should be installed (v4.3.9 or more recent). If not pre-installed (zsh --version to confirm), check the following instruction here: Installing ZSH
• curl or wget should be installed
• git should be installed

Basic Installation

Oh My Zsh is installed by running one of the following commands in your terminal. You can install this via the command-line with either curl or wget.

via curl

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

via wget

sh -c "$(wget -O- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Manual inspection

It's a good idea to inspect the install script from projects you don't yet know. You can do that by downloading the install script first, looking through it so everything looks normal, then running it:

curl -Lo install.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh
sh install.sh

Using Oh My Zsh

Plugins

Oh My Zsh comes with a shitload of plugins to take advantage of. You can take a look in the plugins directory and/or the wiki to see what's currently available.

Enabling Plugins

Once you spot a plugin (or several) that you'd like to use with Oh My Zsh, you'll need to enable them in the .zshrc file. You'll find the zshrc file in your $HOME directory. Open it with your favorite text editor and you'll see a spot to list all the plugins you want to load.

vi ~/.zshrc

For example, this might begin to look like this:

plugins=(
  git
  bundler
  dotenv
  osx
  rake
  rbenv
  ruby
)

Note that the plugins are separated by whitespace. Do not use commas between them.

Using Plugins

Most plugins (should! we're working on this) include a README, which documents how to use them.

Themes

We'll admit it. Early in the Oh My Zsh world, we may have gotten a bit too theme happy. We have over one hundred themes now bundled. Most of them have screenshots on the wiki. Check them out!

Selecting a Theme

Robby's theme is the default one. It's not the fanciest one. It's not the simplest one. It's just the right one (for him).

Once you find a theme that you'd like to use, you will need to edit the ~/.zshrc file. You'll see an environment variable (all caps) in there that looks like:

ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell"

To use a different theme, simply change the value to match the name of your desired theme. For example:

ZSH_THEME="agnoster" # (this is one of the fancy ones)
# see https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/wiki/Themes#agnoster

Note: many themes require installing the Powerline Fonts in order to render properly.

Open up a new terminal window and your prompt should look something like this:

In case you did not find a suitable theme for your needs, please have a look at the wiki for more of them.

If you're feeling feisty, you can let the computer select one randomly for you each time you open a new terminal window.

ZSH_THEME="random" # (...please let it be pie... please be some pie..)

And if you want to pick random theme from a list of your favorite themes:

ZSH_THEME_RANDOM_CANDIDATES=(
  "robbyrussell"
  "agnoster"
)

Advanced Topics

If you're the type that likes to get their hands dirty, these sections might resonate.

Advanced Installation

Some users may want to manually install Oh My Zsh, or change the default path or other settings that the installer accepts (these settings are also documented at the top of the install script).

Custom Directory

The default location is ~/.oh-my-zsh (hidden in your home directory)

If you'd like to change the install directory with the ZSH environment variable, either by running export ZSH=/your/path before installing, or by setting it before the end of the install pipeline like this:

ZSH="$HOME/.dotfiles/oh-my-zsh" sh install.sh

Unattended install

If you're running the Oh My Zsh install script as part of an automated install, you can pass the flag --unattended to the install.sh script. This will have the effect of not trying to change the default shell, and also won't run zsh when the installation has finished.

curl -Lo install.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh
sh install.sh --unattended

Installing from a forked repository

The install script also accepts these variables to allow installation of a different repository:

• REPO (default: robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh): this takes the form of owner/repository. If you set this variable, the installer will look for a repository at https://github.com/{owner}/{repository}.

• REMOTE (default: https://github.com/${REPO}.git): this is the full URL of the git repository clone. You can use this setting if you want to install from a fork that is not on GitHub (GitLab, Bitbucket...) or if you want to clone with SSH instead of HTTPS (git@github.com:user/project.git).

  NOTE: it's incompatible with setting the REPO variable. This setting will take precedence.

• BRANCH (default: master): you can use this setting if you want to change the default branch to be checked out when cloning the repository. This might be useful for testing a Pull Request, or if you want to use a branch other than master.

For example:

REPO=apjanke/oh-my-zsh BRANCH=edge sh install.sh

Manual Installation

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh.git ~/.oh-my-zsh

2. Optionally, backup your existing ~/.zshrc file:

cp ~/.zshrc ~/.zshrc.orig

3. Create a new zsh configuration file

You can create a new zsh config file by copying the template that we have included for you.

cp ~/.oh-my-zsh/templates/zshrc.zsh-template ~/.zshrc

4. Change your default shell

chsh -s $(which zsh)

You must log out from your user session and log back in to see this change.

5. Initialize your new zsh configuration

Once you open up a new terminal window, it should load zsh with Oh My Zsh's configuration.

Installation Problems

If you have any hiccups installing, here are a few common fixes.

• You might need to modify your PATH in ~/.zshrc if you're not able to find some commands after switching to oh-my-zsh.
• If you installed manually or changed the install location, check the ZSH environment variable in ~/.zshrc.

Custom Plugins and Themes

If you want to override any of the default behaviors, just add a new file (ending in .zsh) in the custom/ directory.

If you have many functions that go well together, you can put them as a XYZ.plugin.zsh file in the custom/plugins/ directory and then enable this plugin.

If you would like to override the functionality of a plugin distributed with Oh My Zsh, create a plugin of the same name in the custom/plugins/ directory and it will be loaded instead of the one in plugins/.

Getting Updates

By default, you will be prompted to check for upgrades every few weeks. If you would like oh-my-zsh to automatically upgrade itself without prompting you, set the following in your ~/.zshrc:

DISABLE_UPDATE_PROMPT=true

To disable automatic upgrades, set the following in your ~/.zshrc:

DISABLE_AUTO_UPDATE=true

Manual Updates

If you'd like to upgrade at any point in time (maybe someone just released a new plugin and you don't want to wait a week?) you just need to run:

upgrade_oh_my_zsh

Magic! 🎉

Uninstalling Oh My Zsh

Oh My Zsh isn't for everyone. We'll miss you, but we want to make this an easy breakup.

If you want to uninstall oh-my-zsh, just run uninstall_oh_my_zsh from the command-line. It will remove itself and revert your previous bash or zsh configuration.

How do I contribute to Oh My Zsh?

Before you participate in our delightful community, please read the code of conduct.

I'm far from being a Zsh expert and suspect there are many ways to improve – if you have ideas on how to make the configuration easier to maintain (and faster), don't hesitate to fork and send pull requests!

We also need people to test out pull-requests. So take a look through the open issues and help where you can.

See Contributing for more details.

Do NOT send us themes

We have (more than) enough themes for the time being. Please add your theme to the external themes wiki page.

Contributors

Oh My Zsh has a vibrant community of happy users and delightful contributors. Without all the time and help from our contributors, it wouldn't be so awesome.

Thank you so much!

Follow Us

We're on the social media.

• @ohmyzsh on Twitter. You should follow it.
• Oh My Zsh on Facebook.

Merchandise

We have stickers, shirts, and coffee mugs available for you to show off your love of Oh My Zsh. Again, you will become the talk of the town!

License

Oh My Zsh is released under the MIT license.

About Planet Argon

Oh My Zsh was started by the team at Planet Argon, a Ruby on Rails development agency. Check out our other open source projects.