DEV Community: Oh My Zsh

Oh My Zsh: 2020 Year in Review

Robby Russell 🐘🚂 — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 02:12:38 +0000

Oh My Zsh: 2020 Year in Review

What. A. Year.

First off, we'd like to take a moment to acknowledge those who have been impacted by COVID-19. While there are a number of positives for Oh My Zsh in 2020, we can only assume that there are many within our community who have suffered greatly.

We may not know each other, individually, but know that we care about you. 🤗

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1248302655195275270-674'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1248302655195275270&theme=dark" }

So...2020, let's dig into it.

Contribution Stats for 2020

Our year started off with the friendly commit to change the copyright year of the project by Angel_Kitty and the final commit of 2020 was a fix by our delightful core maintainer, Marc, to our new CLI update tool.

Overall, we had 457 commits to the main branch of Oh My Zsh, which included 13 new plugins and 2 new themes.

What were a few of those new plugins? Great question!

We landed new plug-ins for Bazel, sublime-merge, Microsoft .NET CLI, git-lfs, shell-proxy, a password generator, HTTPie, and Lando for Docker...to name a few.

To make this happen, we had many return contributors...but we also had 210 people have code accepted to Oh My Zsh for the first time!

For context, we are approaching 1,800 different people who have source code contributions in the Oh My Zsh that you've all come to love and use. 💘

Community Building in 2020

Outside of code contributions, we also want to reflect on a few other ways that the community expanded.

While this isn't a popularity contest, seeing that we passed 120,000 ⭐️ stars and 20,000 forks on GitHub in 2020 feels like such a great honor.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1263896626411696128-134'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1263896626411696128&theme=dark" }

¡Hola Discord!

In December 2019, Larson Carter (a core contributor and community organizer) helped us launch our very own Discord server. In June, the server got verified. We recently passed 4,000 members!

The Oh My Zsh Discord appears to be growing at around ~680 members each month. In order to nurture that community, a number of people have stepped up to help volunteer time to help people with their installation woes, configuration questions, and provide moderation.

In retrospect, I feel silly for asking Larson, "will anyone even use it?"

So many of you have all loudly answered that. 😜

Curious? Join our Oh My Zsh Discord today!

Partnered with MLH Fellowship

The MLH Fellowship is a 12-week internship for aspiring software engineers. MLH reached out to us to ask if we would provide mentorship and guidance to a few developers while they made contributions to Oh My Zsh.

We signed up for the program and ended up accepting a few updates to the project along with an official MLH theme!

😊 Big thanks to Larson for helping represent Oh My Zsh on that engagement.

Event: Q&A With Maintainers

We hosted a live Q&A session on September 18, 2020, and conducted that over Discord.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1307034733738635264-134'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1307034733738635264&theme=dark" }

It was a lot of fun! We definitely want to schedule more of those in the future.

Fabulous Community Content

We attribute much of our success over the years to word-of-mouth.
Nearly every person we meet in the community can point back to a friend, coworker, classmate, a speaker at a tech conference, or an author of a tutorial they read/watched online as having been where they first about Oh My Zsh.

🤔 Do you recall where you first heard of Oh My Zsh? Could you share your story in the comments?

Reflecting back on 2020, we wanted to highlight a few blog posts and videos that caught our attention. In no particular order.

Blog Posts

Speeding Up My Shell (Oh My Zsh) by Matt Clemente
The Ultimate Guide to Your Terminal Makeover by Shinichi Okada
Setting up the iMac - zsh, Oh My Zsh & Dracula by Sahil Parikh
...but I want a pretty PROMPT! by Inee Ader
Boost Your Productivity By Using The Terminal (iTerm & ZSH) by Michael Hoffman
WSL2: Making Windows 10 the perfect dev machine! by Christian Dennig
How to Set Up Your MacBook for Web Development in 202 by Mohammad Alhasan

📝 Did you write a blog post about Oh My Zsh? Please link to it in the comments!

Video Tutorials

...and Brodie Robertson has a few things to say about why you shouldn't use Oh My Zsh. We encourage you to watch it!

You Really Don't Need Oh My Zsh And Here's Why (Rant)

📺 do you have a good video from 2020? Please include a link in the comments!

🤓😍🙃 Delightful Tweets

Here are a handful of happy tweets that we've seen made about Oh My Zsh in 2020.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1257430689051541505-430'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1257430689051541505&theme=dark" }

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1263394368121040897-557'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1263394368121040897&theme=dark" }

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1212897940986970112-85'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1212897940986970112&theme=dark" }

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1253346224880734209-328'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1253346224880734209&theme=dark" }

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1297581716685627393-930'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1297581716685627393&theme=dark" }

Thanks for keeping us smiling!

GitHub README Project

Marc and I (Robby) were invited to participate in The ReadME Project, which gave us an opportunity to share our open source journey.

It also meant that we each had a good excuse to get dressed up--in the middle of a global pandemic--and meet professional photographers for a social-distance-friendly photoshoot. 📸 🕺🏻

Here are links to each of our stories.

Marc's ReadME Project

Inspired to not only consume, but contribute

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1316471347149787136-204'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1316471347149787136&theme=dark" }

Robby's ReadME Project

Finding strength and purpose in collaboration

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1314241004472598528-665'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1314241004472598528&theme=dark" }

Stickers, T-shirts, and buttons

We shipped a lot of t-shirts, stickers, coasters, and buttons in 2020. We appreciate the support and really enjoy seeing photos of them out in the world.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1286744700360118272-47'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1286744700360118272&theme=dark" }

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1326237667286155264-520'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1326237667286155264&theme=dark" }

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1302034971037634560-325'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1302034971037634560&theme=dark" }

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1298284226379423744-829'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1298284226379423744&theme=dark" }

Looking for new gear for 2021? do take a look around our online shop.

Keep Your WFH photos coming

Your WFH photos have been lovely. We appreciate them. You can see a bunch in the replies on this tweet.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1242898030207983618-837'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1242898030207983618&theme=dark" }

Hello, GitHub homepage?

...and who doesn't like seeing their logo on the new GitHub homepage?

🕵🏼‍♀️ 🎙 Setting the record straight...

In 2020, I wanted to test out a new feature in Twitter and opted to clear up any confusion about how to pronounce Oh My Zsh.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1316183160246337536-767'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1316183160246337536&theme=dark" }

How does this resonate with you?

Going into 2021?

We looking forward to sharing more about our plans as we head into 2021. Do keep an eye out on Github, Twitter, and on Dev.to. 🙃

Thank you, you, and you, and you over there, and yeah, you, the one still reading this, and let's not forget about you...yeah, you, the who just ate a 🍪. Thank you, too!

Love,
The Oh My Zsh team

Migrating Oh My Zsh to our GitHub organization

Marc Cornellà — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 21:27:23 +0000

`$ mv robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh`

Background

How the project started was already talked about in this blog post by Robby. It talks of the serendipity and dumb luck of starting a popular and still growing project, and some of the philosophies behind it. Since then, 10 years have past (we celebrated it in style), and the size of the project made evident that we were lacking something. Something that only a GitHub organization could give us.

Liquid error: internal

The organization was created in September of 2016(the first public reference is of late 2016), but it wasn’t put to use for real until beginning this year when a repository for GitHub Actions was created. We didn’t really talk about a migration until much later, probably because the thought of breaking something was too stressful. It turned out though that we didn’t have any reasons to be concerned.

The final decision was made 2 weeks ago: the project had grown so much that it didn’t make sense to have it hamstrung by being under a personal account. GitHub has many features and advantages for open source projects that are only applicable under an organization.

Some of the main features of GitHub organizations that we needed were member roles and fine-grained permissions, to easily onboard maintainers at a pace we’d be comfortable with, and also a better experience with GitHub Actions that we couldn’t get with the project being under a personal account. We’re excited to dive in and find many other cool stuff that GitHub has built.

The process

As it turns out, the process of transferring a personal repository to an organization is really easy and has very few caveats. It’s obvious that GitHub did really think it through. Here are some of the items we thought important to cover for the transfer (taken from #8388):

Update main / billing email address to Robby's email
Notify the teams
Transfer repository to @ohmyzsh
Rename repository from oh-my-zsh to ohmyzsh for consistency
Update all instances of old URL in codebase
Update all instances of old URL in the wiki
Update website install guide
Add automatic remote reset when performing an upgrade (this should check the remote matches robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh)

3 and 4 are the only really necessary ones. Everything else comes second: we could live without doing them but they’re a nice-to-have, as GitHub takes care of redirecting the old URLs. There have been no documented hiccups while the transfer was in process; this really says a lot about GitHub.

What does this mean for the end user?

Great question. We attempted to make this transition as simple and seamless as possible and, as we’ve said before, GitHub has made it very easy. Here are the things that have been transferred along with the repository:

Issues, including Pull Requests
Wiki
Stars
Watchers
Webhooks
Forks associated
Issue assignments to members of the organization

We also added an automatic reset of the git remote URL in the ohmyzsh folder ($ZSH). This reset only applies if the git remote is the default one (robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh via HTTPS). For this reset to be applied, there needs to be a 2-step upgrade: once to download the remote reset logic, and once again to apply it. As always, you can trigger an upgrade with upgrade_oh_my_zsh.

Users using an SSH URL or other valid git remote URLs should make the change manually. Again, nothing happens if this isn’t done, GitHub takes care of the redirection, but it’s just to avoid confusion.

Going forward

The project has been a little behind the times compared to other successful projects. We want to fix that from now on. One of the things we’re fixing is that the community doesn’t have a place other than GitHub issues to talk to each other. This is why we have created a Discord server, with the goal of putting users in touch with each other and also to get support from the community. We have other goals in mind to get the project to the state that the community deserves that we'll get to in a future article.

Developers

Robby Russell: original creator and maintainer.
Marc Cornellà: maintainer for the past few years.
Larson Carter: newly added maintainer.

🎙 check

Robby Russell 🐘🚂 — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 14:52:10 +0000

tap

is this thing on?