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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.
Project mention: Oh My Zsh now supports a configurable update cooldown | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-09-11 -
AppSignal
AppSignal knows why the f*#k it crashed. Stop vibe-debugging. Every exception, every backtrace, grouped so you see patterns, not noise.
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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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nvm
Node Version Manager - POSIX-compliant bash script to manage multiple active node.js versions. $nvm: 3ArcxqLtXMmBnWbbtfwQgVL3MNnDsggzgGDtXMnjpump
Project mention: Building AI Agents with the TypeScript Agent Development Kit (ADK) | dev.to | 2026-07-27View on GitHub
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Warp engineer here - Warp is open source as well if there's anything we can do to improve the default experience. Otherwise, it's available to fork and customize: https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp
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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.
Project mention: Git History Command: The Safer Way to Split, Reword, and Fixup Commits | dev.to | 2026-07-14Git 2.55 release notes
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Kargo
Stop Scripting Promotions. Start Shipping with Kargo. Kargo automates promotion across dev, staging, and prod with approval gates and verification. Open source, built by the team behind Argo CD. Download now.
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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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Project mention: TLS certificates for internal services done right | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-07-09
> I use the acme dns-1 challenge on my public domain.
See also perhaps DNS aliasing in case you are not able to dynamically update your 'primary' domain, but can update a secondary or sub-domain:
* https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh/wiki/DNS-alias-mo...
So if "example.com" is control by Corporate IT, and they don't want 'random' folks fiddling with it, then you can create a "dnsauth.example.com" and point the dns-1 challenge record from "…foo.example.com" to "foo.dnsauth.example.com" (or a completely different domain, like "…example.net").
There are DNS server written strictly focused on this use case:
* https://github.com/acme-dns/acme-dns
Also code that handles a bunch of DNS provider APIs so you don't have to roll your own for ACME client hooks:
* https://github.com/dns-lexicon/dns-lexicon
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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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Whilst I agree that Bash makes it far too easy to do it wrong, it's not too tricky to write scripts that don't have those issues.
Possibly the most important tip is to use ShellCheck (https://www.shellcheck.net/) as a linter on your scripts and work through the various warnings to eliminate them. For the rare times that ShellCheck is overly cautious, you can remove a specific warning with a comment before the offending line such as
# shellcheck disable=SC1091 -
Project mention: Zoxide Setup That Actually Works: Install, Initialize, and Verify | dev.to | 2026-08-07
Disclosure: I maintain zoxide.org as an independent guide site. It is not the official zoxide project. Commands in this post were checked against the official zoxide repository.
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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: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-07-14
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Project mention: What Active Rubyists Are Using in 2026: A Maintainer's Read of the RubyKaigi Survey | dev.to | 2026-07-03
mise / asdf: ~145
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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).
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A note from our sponsor - AppSignal
www.appsignal.com | 13 Sep 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Shell projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ohmyzsh | 189,682 |
| 2 | thefuck | 97,537 |
| 3 | nvm | 95,065 |
| 4 | warp | 65,002 |
| 5 | nerd-fonts | 64,590 |
| 6 | tldr | 63,692 |
| 7 | Git | 63,129 |
| 8 | Pi-hole | 60,873 |
| 9 | PowerShell | 55,314 |
| 10 | acme.sh | 47,629 |
| 11 | zx | 45,742 |
| 12 | pyenv | 45,089 |
| 13 | nushell | 40,500 |
| 14 | ShellCheck | 40,033 |
| 15 | zoxide | 39,433 |
| 16 | awesome-shell | 37,521 |
| 17 | zsh-autosuggestions | 35,717 |
| 18 | fish-shell | 34,191 |
| 19 | modern-unix | 33,029 |
| 20 | WindTerm | 32,159 |
| 21 | atuin | 31,572 |
| 22 | cmder | 27,005 |
| 23 | asdf | 25,583 |
Sponsored
AppSignal knows why the f*#k it crashed.
Stop vibe-debugging. Every exception, every backtrace, grouped so you see patterns, not noise.
www.appsignal.com