Oh My Zsh’s take command

The Oh My Zsh take command is basically a shortcut for “set something up and immediately cd into it.” At its simplest, it wraps mkdir -p + cd, but it extends the same idea to git repositories and remote archives.

For local work, it behaves like a smarter mkdir that keeps you in context. So instead of creating a folder and then moving into it manually, you just do:

take my/new/project

This creates the full path if needed and drops you into the final directory.

It also supports git repositories. If you pass a git URL, it will clone the repo and immediately enter it:

take [email protected]:rails/rails.git

You end up inside the cloned repository right away, which removes the usual “git clone → cd” sequence. It’s especially useful when quickly inspecting or experimenting with a repo.

There’s similar handling for remote archives. If the argument looks like a .tar.gz, .tar.xz, or similar tarball, it will download it, extract it, and then move into the extracted directory:

take https://example.com/project.tar.gz

This is basically a “download source distribution and enter workspace” shortcut, assuming the archive has a sensible top-level directory structure.

ZIP files are handled similarly. A ZIP URL gets downloaded and unzipped into the current directory, and take then tries to infer the extracted root folder and cd into it:

take https://example.com/project.zip

This one is a bit more heuristic than the tar handling, since ZIP archives are less consistent in how they structure top-level directories.

Under the hood, take is just a dispatcher that decides which of these behaviors to trigger based on the input pattern: local paths go to mkcd / takedir, git URLs go to takegit, tar archives go to takeurl, and zip archives go to takezip. The consistent idea across all of them is eliminating the repeated setup steps, so every operation ends with you already inside the working directory.