2019-07-14
Top Popular ZSH Plugins on GitHub (2019)
On the GitHub project Awesome Zsh plugins you can find 1700+ links to plugins, themes, and Zsh plugin managers/frameworks. The number of tools listed on that page is high and it is difficult to get orientation on which plugins gained already a good reputation from the Zsh users community. This post aims at identifying the most popular tools where popularity is measured by the number of stars that Github users added to a given plugin or tool.
NOTE: This article was written in 2019, for a more recent version of the ranking see: 2023. There is a series of articles dedicated to Zsh plugins: 2018, 2019, 2021, 2023. The older articles have description of the selected, interesting tools that are not in this article - so you might also to visit the older editions of the survey.
Here is a list of command line tools and Zsh plugins improving the experience when working in text mode. The list was created using resources from Awesome Zsh plugins. The GitHub collection is called "Zsh plugins" but in fact, it is not strictly limited to Zsh plugins but contains a lot of CLI tools that are not Zsh plugins. I made already a similar list 1.5 years ago - you can find results here: top zsh plugins.
On the GitHub project Awesome Zsh plugins you can find currently 1700+ links to plugins, themes, and Zsh plugin managers/frameworks. The collection grows in size and gets more and more intimidating for the reader. I decided to filter out tools that are most popular. The popularity is measured with the number of stars that Github users added to given plugin.
What are Github stars?
Stars is the way how users can 'bookmark' projects - this can serve as indication for others that project successfully grabbed someone's attention. The stargazers statistics are available via GithubAPI. The metrics is not capturing directly how popular given tool is but I expect, it is a good indication of how well is grabbing attention of Github users. For sake of clarity, I have excluded frameworks, themes, prompts and fonts that are also listed on "Awesome Zsh plugins" website. The most popular choices excluded from the tools list are posted in the end of this article.
Top 20 most popular tools as of July 2019
| link | description | stars |
|---|---|---|
| thefuck | Magnificent app which corrects your previous console command | 44.7k |
| fzf | A command-line fuzzy finder | 22.7k |
| pyenv | Simple Python version management | 15.9k |
| ripgrep | ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern | 15.3k |
| bat | A cat(1) clone with wings | 14.4k |
| powerline | Powerline is a statusline plugin for vim, and provides statuslines and prompts for several other applications, including zsh, bash, tmux, IPython, Awesome and Qtile | 10.5k |
| z | z - jump around | 10.2k |
| zsh-autosuggestions | Fish-like autosuggestions for zsh | 10.0k |
| autojump | A cd command that learns - easily navigate directories from the command line | 9.8k |
| tmuxinator | Manage complex tmux sessions easily | 9.1k |
| ctop | Top-like interface for container metrics | 8.7k |
| zsh-syntax-highlighting | Fish shell like syntax highlighting for Zsh | 7.5k |
| peco | Simplistic interactive filtering tool | 5.4k |
| asdf | Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more | 5.4k |
| blackbox | Safely store secrets in Git/Mercurial/Subversion | 4.9k |
| newman | Newman is a command-line collection runner for Postman | 3.7k |
| zsh-completions | Additional completion definitions for Zsh | 2.8k |
| percol | Adds flavor of interactive filtering to the traditional pipe concept of UNIX shell | 2.8k |
| terragrunt | Terragrunt is a thin wrapper for Terraform that provides extra tools for working with multiple Terraform modules | 2.7k |
| joe | A .gitignore magician in your command line | 2.7k |
Any comments or suggestions? Let me know.
To cite this article:
@article{Saf2019Top,
author = {Krystian Safjan},
title = {Top Popular ZSH Plugins on GitHub (2019)},
journal = {Krystian's Safjan Blog},
year = {2019},
}