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

It comes bundled with a ton of helpful functions, helpers, plugins, themes, and a few things that make you shout…

“OH MY ZSHELL!”

Setup

oh-my-zsh should work with any recent release of Zsh. The minimum recommended version is 4.3.9.

If not already installed, you can install Zsh using the command-line.

The automatic installer… do you trust me?

You can install this via the command-line with either curl or wget.

via curl:

curl -L http://install.ohmyz.sh | sh

via wget:

wget --no-check-certificate http://install.ohmyz.sh -O - | sh

Optionally, change the install directory:

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

You can 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:

curl -L https://raw.github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh | ZSH=~/.dotfiles/zsh sh

The manual way

1. Clone the repository:

git clone git://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 config file by copying the Zsh template we’ve provided:

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

4. Set Zsh as your default shell:

chsh -s /bin/zsh

5. Start or restart Zsh by opening a new command-line window.

Problems?

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.

Usage

• enable the plugins you want in your ~/.zshrc (take a look at the plugins/ directory and the wiki to see what’s available)
  • example: plugins=(git osx ruby)
• theme support: change the ZSH_THEME environment variable in ~/.zshrc
  • take a look at the themes/ directory and the wiki to see what comes bundled with oh-my-zsh
• & much, much more… take a look at the lib/ directory to see what oh-my-zsh has to offer…

Useful

The refcard is pretty useful for tips.

Customization

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 *.plugin.zsh file in the custom/plugins/ directory and then enable this plugin (see ‘Usage’ above).

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/.

Updates

By default you will be prompted to check for upgrades. 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 upgrades entirely, set the following in your ~/.zshrc:

DISABLE_AUTO_UPDATE=true

To upgrade directly from the command-line, just run upgrade_oh_my_zsh.

Uninstalling

If you want to uninstall oh-my-zsh, just run uninstall_oh_my_zsh from the command-line and it’ll remove itself and revert you to bash (or your previous Zsh configuration).

Help out!

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!

(Don’t) send us your theme (for now)!

I’m hoping to collect a bunch of themes – you can see existing ones in the themes/ directory.

We have enough themes for the time being. Please fork the project and add on in there – you can let people know how to grab it from there.

Contributors

This project wouldn’t exist without all of our awesome users and contributors: view our growing list of contributors

Thank you so much!