[oh-my-zsh] plugin 'zsh-autosuggestions' not found

[ryancrawcour]

after installing zsh-autosuggestions, and then adding the zsh-autosuggestions plugin to my .zshrc plugings section and restarting my terminal, i keep getting "oh-my-zsh] plugin 'zsh-autosuggestions' not found"

what am i doing wrong?

[aifrim]

Depends on how you installed it. I've installed it via brew and I had to do this

source $(brew --prefix)/share/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh

And not add it to the plugins list. You may need to do something similar.

[brandon-fryslie]

What have you tried? Where is the file installed by brew? Is it in the right place for oh-my-zsh to find it? Are you sure this isn't an issue with oh-my-zsh?

[SirusCodes]

@brandon-fryslie I'm facing the same issue; have you fixed it?

[brandon-fryslie]

Yes I have, in a sense. Do not install zsh plugins with homebrew. I'm not sure why they decided to allow them. They're not applications. Homebrew was not designed to install these, and the plugins are not designed to be installed with homebrew.

Use a zsh plugin manager such as zgenom or zcomet. They are designed for this purpose and work a lot better.

Feel free to check out my repo GitHub.com/brandon-fryslie/rad-shell for a one line install script for setting up zgenom with some default plugins (it's just a light wrapper that makes using zgenom more convenient). Alternatively zcomet looks like a good option imo, I'll prob switch over at some point but zgenom works great.

Happy to provide any support for rad-shell to get you rocking and rolling. I've been writing zsh plugins for about 10 years and using a zsh plugin manager is absolutely the best way to do this. Unless you have a burning desire to spend a lot of extra time doing something you could have working in 5 minutes or less (rad-shell).

Edit: I realized this issue is not specific to homebrew. Regardless, I'm going to recommend one of two things. Use rad-shell if you want this to be done in 5 minutes and have an easy way to use whatever plugins from any GitHub repository (add a plugin to the ~/.rad-plugins file, open a new terminal, done). Or if you want to spend an hour or so just use zcomet or zgenom directly. The docs are adequate.

If you want to avoid using a prebuilt solution, you will need to be prepared to learn how these things work internally. Conceptually it's very simple: you "source" a zsh file. That's all loading a plugin does.

source /path/to/the-plugin.zsh

If you want to manage putting the right files somewhere and manually configuring that stuff, you can. That's what the plugin managers do, except they also handle cloning the repos, pulling in updates, and include various optimizations. If you think you want to implement a few simple functions to handle cloning and sourcing this stuff yourself to avoid a "heavy dependency", I'd consider that you're basically just implementing a worse version of these tools. Useful as a learning exercise, but a net negative for usage. You could have had rad-shell working by the time you finish reading this anyway.

This plugin is included in the rad-shell defaults. that's your quickest path to having this plugin working.

[brandon-fryslie]

I use an optimized version of the oh-my-zsh core and don't have a "plugins list". I don't know how that works because oh-my-zsh doesn't have any sort of plugin management functionality. It likely only works with stuff that is built into oh-my-zsh. It is not necessary to use it and I would recommend avoiding it.

Using one of the tools I mentioned allows you to load plugins from any git repo, including oh-my-zsh. Install rad-shell and look at the .rad-plugins file for examples as I load several oh-my-zsh plugins, as well as others.

Most of the work I've done recently is in my brandon-fryslie/rad-plugins repo. The core of rad-shell is trivial and rarely changes, it's essentially a hundred or two lines of boilerplate config. You can make your own plugins repo simply by using the same file structure as the rad-plugins then load them from GitHub the same way I am. I created those plugins over time as a way to organize my shell tools and keep my zshrc file from being a hassle to manage (and share configs between devices). Even if you never used a single 3rd party plugin there are a ton of benefits to setting this up.

Even if it only takes you 5 minutes to do this stuff manually, i still prefer a solution that only takes 5 seconds. I wrote rad-shell so I can try a new zsh plugin in 5s and remove it just as easily if I don't like it. Hope you enjoy. File a GitHub issue if you run into any problems and I'll address it asap.

[SirusCodes]

Thanks @brandon-fryslie, I also got it fixed, I had added the source command at the end of .zshrc but I had also added it in the plugins property.

It was also looking for it in the plugins directly while also activated the plugin because the brew installed one worked.

I'm pretty new to these things so I guess it will take some time to get used to such things.

Thanks for suggesting plugin managers I will look into it

[brandon-fryslie]

You will have a lot more success with far less effort with this:

https://github.com/brandon-fryslie/rad-shell?tab=readme-ov-file#install-with-default-plugins-quickstart

Run that command and open a new terminal and it's configured. It's designed to be fast, simple, and reliable, without compromising functionality.