In this episode, Oh My Zsh founder Robby Russell tells the story of how he unexpectedly launched one of the most popular zsh configuration frameworks out there. He shares his process, some mean tweets, and his advice for people starting open source projects. Written and read by Robby Russell: https://twitter.com/robbyrussell  Original article: https://fcc.im/2HzyjYN Learn to code for free at: https://www.freecodecamp.org Intro music by Vangough: https://fcc.im/2APOG02 Transcript: How I unexpectedly built a monster of an open source project It was the summer of 2009. I found myself helping a coworker debug something in their terminal. As I attempted to type in a few command lines, I noticed that the prompt wasn’t responding to the shortcuts that my brain had grown accustomed to. Frustrated, I exclaimed, “when are you finally going to switch over to Zsh?!” (yeah, I was the type of annoying coworker that would constantly point out that X was better than Y when given the chance. In hindsight, I don’t know how they put up with me…but between you and me, I had a point.) At that point in time, I had been a daily Zsh user for a little over three years. Some of my #caboose friends shared a few of their .zshrc configurations within our IRC channel. After a few years, my .zshrc file grew into a tangled rat's nest. Honestly, I didn’t know what ~30% of the configuration did. I trusted my friends enough to run with it, though. What I did know was that I had some git branch and status details, color highlighting for a few tools (i.e., grep), autocompleting file paths over SSH connections, and a handful of shortcuts for Rake and Capistrano. Working on a machine with a default Bash profile felt remarkably archaic; I’d become dependent on these shortcuts. A few coworkers were happy to copy/paste the .zshrc file that I shared and begin using it. A few others wouldn’t because they knew that I didn’t know what some of it did. Fair enough. After a few attempts to convert them and getting nowhere, I opted for a different approach. First, I reorganized my .zshrc configuration, which involved breaking it up into a collection of smaller files. My thinking here was that this would a) help me better understand how all of these bits worked while b) helping educate my peers when they went to read the code. Pre-empting their next question, “how do I get this to work on my machine?”, I drafted the first setup instructions. Most importantly, I packaged all these files into a shiny new git repository. I figured that if I tossed it up on Github, my peers would be able to collaborate with me on improving it. While not a huge leap, it was a step above inviting people to copy/paste a text file from Pastie. On Aug. 28th, 2009, Oh My Zsh was born. …but, wait a minute!! Where are the themes? Where are the plugins? Installation scripts? Logo? This might come to a surprise to most of the Oh My Zsh user base, but none of those were features that I had considered. My goal with the project was not to build a framework for maintaining Zsh configurations but to share my own config with my coworkers so that they’d use Zsh. Within a day of sharing it with all of my coworkers, everyone at Planet Argon had migrated from Bash to Zsh. Victory! …or so I thought. The first feature request came in the next day. “How do I customize MY prompt?” Two coworkers asked me how they could customize their prompt. They wanted to change the colors and the information that was displayed. What the hell!? Wasn’t my prompt compelling enough for them? So nitpicky. ;-) I pointed to the prompt.zsh file and said they could modify that. Quickly, this became an issue as they now had their own version of that file. As a result, this would add some complexity if we all wanted to share some of our shortcuts and features as we’d have conflicts to deal with. Hmm… So, a day after first announcing Oh My Zsh on my blog, I began introducing the initial concept of themes. Meanwhile, I got my first external pull-re