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 (22422 stars) is a Emacs 24 distribution that builds on Evil-mode with ports of popular Vim plugins to closer emulate a Vim environment.
• Doom Emacs (14776 stars) is an Emacs framework for the stubborn martian hacker.
• Prelude (4846 stars) is an enhanced Emacs 24 distribution that should make your experience with Emacs both more pleasant and more powerful.
• use-package (3966 stars) is a declaration macro for simplifying your .emacs
• Cask (1201 stars) is a package manager for Emacs.

Vim

• vim-plug (28709 stars) is a simple plugin manager that supports parallel installations / upgrades.
• Vundle (23162 stars) is short for Vim Bundle and is a plugin manager for Vim. It works with Pathogen compatible vim plugins.
• spf13-vim (15361 stars) is Steve Francia’s Vim distribution of vim plugins and resources for Vim, Gvim and MacVim.
• Pathogen (11895 stars) is a plugin manager for Vim.
• Janus (7891 stars) is a distribution of plugins and mappings for Vim, Gvim and MacVim.
• Neobundle (2276 stars) is a next generation Vim plugin manager.
• dotvim (151 stars) is a community driven framework for vim.

Shell

• Liquid Prompt (4186 stars) is a full-featured and carefully designed adaptive prompt for Bash and ZSH.
• sheldon (463 stars) A fast, configurable, shell plugin manager

Bash

• bash-it (13079 stars) is a “shameless ripoff of oh-my-zsh,” but for bash.

Fish

• Oh My Fish (8637 stars) is a fish-shell framework inspired by oh-my-zsh.
• Fisher (5956 stars) is a package manager for the fish shell.

ZSH

• oh-my-zsh (148701 stars) is a community-driven framework for managing your ZSH configuration. It bundles 40+ plugins and 80+ themes.
• Prezto (12938 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 (11352 stars) is a list of ZSH plugins, themes and completions compatible with Zsh frameworks like antigen, oh-my-zsh and zgenom.
• antigen (7201 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 (5154 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 (1692 stars) is a shell plugin manager made from the ground up thinking about performance.
• zgen (1390 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. zgen is no longer being maintained, we recommend switching to use the zgenom fork.
• slimzsh (577 stars) is a small starter framework for ZSH that features the pure prompt, syntax highlighting and tab completion.
• zsh-quickstart-kit (558 stars) A quickstart for ZSH and zgenom. It includes a zgenom setup, a starter list of plugins, the zsh-users/zsh-completions collection, and the powerlevel10k theme.
• zgenom (219 stars) is a lightweight plugin manager for ZSH that is a superset of zgen. It provides simple commands for managing plugins. It clones and installs your plugins and generates a static init script that will source them for you every time you run the shell. We do this to save some startup time by not having to execute time consuming logic (plugin checking, updates, etc) every time a new shell session is started. While this means that you have to manually check for updates (zgenom update) and reset the init script (zgenom reset) whenever you add or remove plugins, it lets us have a minimal overhead when starting up the shell because nobody likes waiting. Zgenom can use oh-my-zsh and Prezto compliant plugins and themes.
• dotzsh (207 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.
• antigen-hs (205 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.