zgen Review

5 1

Review of zgen powered by the Slant community.

A lightweight plugin manager for Zsh inspired by Antigen. Keep your .zshrc clean and simple.

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Pros

Pro
Easy to use

Loading plugins can be done with a simple command. A git url can be specified to load plugins without any manual configuration or setup. Packages and themes from other plugin managers can be loaded from zgen without the entire plugin manager being installed.

Pro
Clean .zshrc

zgen uses an init.zsh to load plugins which means basic load commands can be used in a zshrc making it easy to manage.

Pro
Fast startup

zgen has a very fast startup if configured properly compared to oh-my-zsh.

Cons

Con
Reset required after plugin update

Because an init.zsh is used, if you load more plugins you must run zgen reset to reset the init.zsh. This can be done automatically in a .zshrc with the zgen saved variable.