Tool-specific frameworks

For a lot of us, a big chunk of our ~ folder is devoted to our shell and our text editor. Until you’re ready to roll your own setup, these projects make customization safe and easy.

Editors

Emacs

• Spacemacs (19246 stars) is a Emacs 24 distribution that builds on Evil-mode with ports of popular Vim plugins to closer emulate a Vim environment.
• Prelude (4273 stars) is an enhanced Emacs 24 distribution that should make your experience with Emacs both more pleasant and more powerful.
• use-package (2935 stars) is a declaration macro for simplifying your .emacs
• Cask (1063 stars) is a package manager for Emacs.

Vim

• Vundle (20795 stars) is short for Vim Bundle and is a plugin manager for Vim. It works with Pathogen compatible vim plugins.
• vim-plug (17326 stars) is a simple plugin manager that supports parallel installations / upgrades.
• spf13-vim (14198 stars) is Steve Francia’s Vim distribution of vim plugins and resources for Vim, Gvim and MacVim.
• Pathogen (11180 stars) is a plugin manager for Vim.
• Janus (7775 stars) is a distribution of plugins and mappings for Vim, Gvim and MacVim.
• Neobundle (2232 stars) is a next generation Vim plugin manager.
• dotvim (148 stars) is a community driven framework for vim.

Shell

• Liquid Prompt (3875 stars) is a full-featured and carefully designed adaptive prompt for Bash and ZSH.

Bash

• bash-it (11084 stars) is a “shameless ripoff of oh-my-zsh,” but for bash.

Fish

• Oh My Fish (5660 stars) is a fish-shell framework inspired by oh-my-zsh.
• Fisher (4025 stars) is a package manager for the fish shell.

ZSH

• oh-my-zsh (102077 stars) is a community-driven framework for managing your ZSH configuration. It bundles 40+ plugins and 80+ themes.
• Prezto (10885 stars) is a configuration framework for ZSH. It’s a lightweight alternative to oh-my-zsh with sane defaults, aliases, functions, auto completion, prompt themes and dozens of well documented modules.
• awesome-zsh-plugins (7218 stars) is a list of ZSH plugins, themes and completions compatible with Zsh frameworks like antigen, oh-my-zsh and zgen.
• antigen (5585 stars) is a framework for using plugins and themes in your ZSH configuration. It will automatically clone repositories containing the plugins you’re using without you having to manually create submodules or clones, and supports using oh-my-zsh plugins and themes as well as ones published as separate repositories.
• zplug (3588 stars) is a next-generation plugin manager for ZSH. There is more to a ZSH plugin manager than increasing its speed. Also, there is nothing that zplug cannnot do.
• Antibody (1207 stars) is a shell plugin manager made from the ground up thinking about performance.
• zgen (1162 stars) is a lightweight plugin manager for ZSH inspired by Antigen. The goal is to have a minimal overhead when starting up the shell because nobody likes waiting. Zgen will also automatically handle cloning repositories for plugins you’re using without you manually maintaining submodules or clones, and can use oh-my-zsh and Prezto compliant plugins and themes.
• zplugin (777 stars) is an elastic and fast ZSH plugin manager that will allow you to install everything from GitHub and other sites. Zplugin has Turbo mode which yields 50-80% faster ZSH startup!
• slimzsh (346 stars) is a small starter framework for ZSH that features the pure prompt, syntax highlighting and tab completion.
• zsh-quickstart-kit (266 stars) A quickstart for zgen. It includes zgen setup, a starter list of plugins, the zsh-users/zsh-completions collection, and the bullet-train theme.
• antigen-hs (198 stars) is an antigen-inspired ZSH plugin manager that tries to do work statically and only on manual invocation, minimizing the ZSH startup time. Antigen-hs is much more minimalistic and emphasizes convention over configuration more strongly than antigen.
• dotzsh (176 stars) strives to be platform and version independent, some functionality may be lost when running under older versions of ZSH, but it should degrade cleanly and allow you to use the same setup on multiple machines of differing OS’s without problems.