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cloneonly

cloneonly downloads (clones) a plugin or snippet without loading (sourcing) it. The plugin is available on disk but not active in the current shell.

Terminal window
zi ice cloneonly

cloneonly is a flag ice — it takes no value. It prevents the plugin from being sourced or initialized. The plugin directory exists and can be used by other means (e.g. referencing files directly).

Useful for pre-fetching a plugin for later use, or for plugins that are only needed as data sources (e.g. completions installed via zinit creinstall separately).

Works with both plugins and snippets.

Terminal window
# Pre-fetch a completion file without activating the plugin
zi ice cloneonly
zi light user/completions-repo
  • as
  • nocompletions