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Top 23 Shell Open-Source Projects
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ohmyzsh
🙃 A delightful community-driven (with 2,500+ contributors) framework for managing your zsh configuration. Includes 300+ optional plugins (rails, git, macOS, hub, docker, homebrew, node, php, python, etc), 140+ themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community.
We've all been there. You install Zsh, and the very next recommendation you see online is to install Oh-My-Zsh. For a long time, I did exactly that. But over time, the "magic" of heavy frameworks started to wear thin.
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Project mention: Show HN: A faster fuck (thefuck CLI rewritten in Rust) | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-02-26
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Project mention: Node.js vs Bun vs Deno 2 in 2026: Which JavaScript Runtime Should You Actually Use? | dev.to | 2026-06-17
nvm (Node Version Manager): https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm
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nerd-fonts
Iconic font aggregator, collection, & patcher. 3,600+ icons, 50+ patched fonts: Hack, Source Code Pro, more. Glyph collections: Font Awesome, Material Design Icons, Octicons, & more
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/fonts cd ~/.local/share/fonts wget https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/releases/latest/download/JetBrainsMono.zip unzip JetBrainsMono.zip fc-cache -fv
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tldr is perfect when man pages are too detailed and you only need the common examples.
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Git
Git Source Code Mirror - This is a publish-only repository but pull requests can be turned into patches to the mailing list via GitGitGadget (https://gitgitgadget.github.io/). Please follow Documentation/SubmittingPatches procedure for any of your improvements.
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Project mention: 🏗️ Building my home server P5: Network-wide ad blocking with Pi-hole | dev.to | 2026-03-16
In my previous blog post, I covered deploying containers, configuring UFW, and setting up Nginx as a reverse proxy for my services. In this post, I'm taking things a step further by adding network-wide ad blocking to my home lab using Pi-hole. Pi-hole is a DNS sinkhole that blocks ads and trackers at the network level, meaning every device on my local network benefits from it without needing any client-side software. It also comes with a slick web interface for monitoring DNS queries and managing blocklists. On top of that, I configured Pi-hole to handle local DNS resolution for all my home lab services, so I can access them by their subdomain names instead of remembering IP addresses and port numbers.
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acme.sh is maintained by ZeroSSL. https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh#2%EF%B8%8F%E2%83%...
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Clear Code Intelligence scanned a public Google repository: google/zx.
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Install runtimes for your programming languages (e.g., Python, Node.js) using package managers. Use version managers (e.g., pyenv, nvm) to handle multiple language versions across projects.
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Project mention: 🚀 Lambda Deployments v2: Taking the Lambda deployment pipeline from MVP to production-ready | dev.to | 2026-03-16
I added ShellCheck to the CI pipeline. It catches common shell scripting mistakes like unquoted variables, unused variables, and POSIX compliance issues. It runs on every push against all scripts in the scripts/ directory.
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zoxide — Jump to frequently used directories with z [partial name].
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awesome-shell
A curated list of awesome command-line frameworks, toolkits, guides and gizmos. Inspired by awesome-php.
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zsh-autosuggestions gives you fish-like behavior in ZSH. As you type, it shows a grayed-out suggestion based on your history. Press the right arrow to accept it.
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10. fish shell
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Project mention: A Comma and a Question Mark, Redux: Quick Terminal Helpers Using Pi | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-27
Nice ideas! I've been using the `?` shortcut in atuin [0] which accomplishes the same sort of thing, but these days also has access to an Agent-like experience which allows me to prompt something like "Conventional Commit message for unstaged changes" and it will call `git diff` (after asking permission, of course) and then generate the commit message.
[0] https://atuin.sh
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I switched from brew to https://asdf-vm.com/ for this very reason.
I don't understand how devs don't use a tool that makes multiple versions of everything possible.
NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
Shell discussion
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What We Learned Scanning Google's Public zx Repository
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 22 Jun 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Shell projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ohmyzsh | 188,127 |
| 2 | thefuck | 96,569 |
| 3 | nvm | 93,850 |
| 4 | nerd-fonts | 63,424 |
| 5 | tldr | 62,896 |
| 6 | warp | 62,085 |
| 7 | Git | 61,575 |
| 8 | Pi-hole | 59,373 |
| 9 | PowerShell | 53,960 |
| 10 | acme.sh | 46,941 |
| 11 | zx | 45,550 |
| 12 | pyenv | 44,898 |
| 13 | nushell | 39,779 |
| 14 | ShellCheck | 39,590 |
| 15 | zoxide | 37,538 |
| 16 | awesome-shell | 37,126 |
| 17 | zsh-autosuggestions | 35,717 |
| 18 | fish-shell | 33,714 |
| 19 | modern-unix | 32,930 |
| 20 | WindTerm | 31,224 |
| 21 | atuin | 30,278 |
| 22 | cmder | 26,930 |
| 23 | asdf | 25,423 |
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