Alternatives to zsh-syntax-highlighting
Other tools in this directory that do similar work, with a verified install command for each. zsh-syntax-highlighting itself: install zsh-syntax-highlighting.
xxh
🚀 Bring your favorite shell wherever you go through the ssh. Xonsh shell, fish, zsh, osquery and so on
zsh-autosuggestions
Fish-like autosuggestions for zsh
starship
☄🌌️ The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell!
mkcert
A simple zero-config tool to make locally trusted development certificates with any names you'd like
shellcheck
ShellCheck, a static analysis tool for shell scripts
loki
Like Prometheus, but for logs
fastfetch
A maintained, feature-rich and performance oriented, neofetch like system information tool
gum
A tool for glamorous shell scripts 🎀
miller
Miller is like awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for name-indexed data such as CSV, TSV, and tabular JSON
shfmt
A shell parser, formatter, and interpreter with bash and zsh support; includes shfmt
sccache
Sccache is a ccache-like tool. It is used as a compiler wrapper and avoids compilation when possible. Sccache has the capability to utilize caching in
MarkEdit
Just like TextEdit on Mac but dedicated to Markdown
vis
A vi-like editor based on Plan 9's structural regular expressions
Syntax Highlight
Quick Look extension for highlight source code files on macOS 12 and later
pyupgrade
A tool (and pre-commit hook) to automatically upgrade syntax for newer versions of the language
xdg-ninja
A shell script which checks your $HOME for unwanted files and directories
zenith
Zenith - sort of like top or htop but with zoom-able charts, CPU, GPU, network, and disk usage
powerline-go
A beautiful and useful low-latency prompt for your shell, written in go
mdq
like jq but for Markdown: find specific elements in a md doc
httm
Interactive, file-level Time Machine-like tool for ZFS/btrfs/nilfs2 (and even Time Machine and Restic backups!)
pyp
Easily run Python at the shell! Magical, but never mysterious
md4c
C Markdown parser. Fast. SAX-like interface. Compliant to CommonMark specification
lazyjournal
TUI for viewing logs from journald, auditd, file system, Docker and Podman containers, Compose stacks and Kubernetes pods with support for log highlig
bash-preexec
⚡ preexec and precmd functions for Bash just like Zsh
How we picked these
We match on what the tool does and how it installs, then order by how widely each project is used. We're not saying these are better or worse than zsh-syntax-highlighting — that depends on what you're building. We're saying they're the projects people reach for in the same situations, and each one has an install command we checked against its documentation.
zsh-syntax-highlighting is developed by its own authors and this page is an independent reference; we are not affiliated with or sponsored by any project listed, and nothing here is a paid placement.