Is it safe to remove the .oh-my-zsh directory?

Question

One point in time, I tried oh my zsh but it causes a lot of issues so I'm back at bash. I'm trying to clean up some files and notice there is a oh my zsh folder. The github instructions tell me to run uninstall oh my zsh but I don't see that script in my folder.

Is it safe to remove .oh-my-zsh folder?

Solution

.oh-my-zsh isn't used by anything but oh-my-zsh. If you use bash, you can just remove it.

The instructions tell you to run the command uninstall_oh_my_zsh. This is a function that you can invoke from zsh running oh-my-zsh. If you aren't running oh-my-zsh, you can run tools/uninstall.sh, but all it does is:

• remove ~/.oh-my-zsh, which you were going to do anyway;
• switch your login shell to bash, which you've already done;
• restore your old ~/.zshrc, which you didn't have if you never used zsh without oh-my-zsh.

You could also use zsh without oh-my-zsh.

Comments

[Elliott Frisch]

Have you already run chsh? What are you concerned with if you're switching back to bash? Perhaps create a tar backup with tar cfp oh-my-zsh.tar oh-my-zsh/ and then remove it (if you want to be able to restore it later).

[Stephen C]

Read this StackOverflow Q&A - stackoverflow.com/questions/9813983/… It includes a link to the script on github.

[Gilles 'SO- stop being evil']

Pay attention to what you're reading. Punctuation matters. It's not “uninstall oh my zsh” but uninstall_oh_my_sh, not “oh my zsh folder” but .oh-my-zsh (and it's called a directory unless you're using Windows).

[phemmer]

As a side note, did you consider trying zsh without oh-my-zsh? Deciding not to use zsh because of it is like deciding not to use bash because you don't like someone else's .bashrc they gave you.

[arul selvan]

@Patrick. Yes. I like the flashiness of zsh with oh-my-zsh but I ran into issues especially with RVM. It's already pretty hard for me to understand bundle with RVM and I always get confused. Gave me a day's worth of headache. Maybe in the future, I'll try again. Thanks!