Speeding up my ZSH shell

With articles like these popping up all the time, oh-my-zsh is seriously harming zsh's reputation. It's giving the wrong impression of zsh being slow and bloated.

zsh doesn't need configuration frameworks or plugins. All it needs is a change in the default settings so that its powerful completion works out the box. It currently needs more than ideal amount of tweaks to the defaults, which is probably why people flock to these frameworks.

Did something similar recently as well. I did not notice any need for plugins from day one of switching. Fzf can replace a lot of plugins if you know how to use it.

Things like git branch name and virtual envs are handled by starship.

My custom config is less than 10 lines now:

  export HISTSIZE=1000000000
  export SAVEHIST=$HISTSIZE
  setopt EXTENDED_HISTORY
  setopt autocd
  autoload -U compinit; compinit
  source <(fzf --zsh)
  eval "$(starship init zsh)"
  set -o vi

I don't have anything against ZSH or similar shells. I think they are great, but they are not my thing.

Latency is a deal-breaker for me, and this is where autocompletion engines generally introduce surprising user-interactive pauses. I've generally settled with using mksh (or OpenBSD's KSH depending on the environment) with little configuration outside of aliases, variables, and few local functions. I'm not left with this inkling feeling like accidentally running find(1) over an AutoFS file system backed by NFS that needs to authenticate, mount, and then run the operation.

When I need something more sophisticated, I lean on using Go or Elvish and potentially delegate some UI elements out to https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum.

I'd rather keep my shell simpler and delegate out any other complexity to these other programs. Autocompletion and these other features simply aren’t free.

I was an OMZ user pretty much since I adopted ZSH many years ago. I never really experienced much of the slowdown(s) that people tend to complain about. Even still, getting my dotfiles set up on a new machine was always a little bit of pain. I'd try to install OMZ from my OS' package manager, remember that that rarely worked perfectly, gone back to OMZ's webpage and copied the cURL command... the fought with FZF shell integration for about an hour. Finally one Saturday I just stripped it all out. I went with raw ZSH and Antigen for the few plugins I care about. Spinning up new machine is now painless. And I always like simplifying things.

I discovered this issue 2-3 years ago. On slightly older machines, there was a palpable startup time. My fix was going through OhMyZSH and stripping away all the parts that I felt unnecessary (I call this my "leanZSH" and its considerably lighter version of OMZ.) It doesn't track upstream, and I manually update the plugin directory once in a while. Surprisingly OhmyZSH is pretty modular and doesn't break easily.

[Not the best hackjob out there but here it is:

https://github.com/gradientwolf/leanzsh

If you want to update it just copy over the latest `plugin/` folder from OMZ repo. You can get rid of all the plugins you dont want, as well as the themes. It somehow works]

Oh-my-zsh has a lot of cool and handy features, but it is a huge and complex beast. Personally, I only cared about 3–4 features, so I simply removed it and sought out how to enable those features alone.

Additionally, a lot of functionality which I wanted wasn’t there in OMZ, so my setup had a lot of custom bits anyway.

My zshrc, for reference: https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/dotfiles/tree/269248912920d25e...

Oh-my-zsh is very bloated. You might not need it, since its most used features can be implemented with zsh directly: https://ianyepan.github.io/posts/moving-away-from-ohmyzsh/

I switched to Prezto [0] because I found OMZ too slow. Prezto is much faster out of the box and doesn’t have a lot of things enabled by default. Definitely give it a try if you find OMZ too slow on your machine.

[0] https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto

There's so many plugin systems for zsh. From comments it seems like Pretzo is the main one suggested.

But there's a huge list of different offerings. Looking at https://github.com/sindresorhus/pure?tab=readme-ov-file#inte... , there's also for example zim, zplug, zinit, zi. It's be so great to have see some deeper investigations or comparisons: is Pretzo really the best choice? Aside from seeming popularity, why?

At least found this neat gist with a cheat sheet for different zsh plugin systems (and how very many there are!) https://gist.github.com/olets/06009589d7887617e061481e22cf5a...

I moved to fish 3 years ago, haven't noticed a difference till date.

https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k?tab=readme-ov-file#...

I use Starship, so this applies to both ZSH & Fish:

If you have the Python environment displayed in Starship, your largest gain in speed is to replace pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv by uv.