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.
I don't want to spend ages figuring out which knobs to turn to get a half decent shell. If there's an alternative to oh-my-zsh that looks halfway decent, has that nice fzf integrated, and the 'ghost text' history suggestions, then I welcome it!
If zsh has its completion fully configured by default, there will be no need for most people to turn knobs nor will it be a "half decent shell." It'll be the best shell, if it isn't already.
I wonder why ghost text history suggestions are popular though, I'd rather not have it. Shell history search works better, and I don't want my shell always showing me or whoever else is looking at the screen random commands that I've previously typed.
> If zsh has its completion fully configured by default, there will be no need for most people to turn knobs nor will it be a "half decent shell." It'll be the best shell, if it isn't already.
The curse of backward compatibility means that zsh does not break your setup or change things on you. And there are still developers left who bear the trauma from the one time that was tried back in the early-mid 90s in the 2.x version series. Sadly that means many new features remain inactive by default, especially anything written in shell-code like command-specific completions.
I for one use and like using both fzf on the search history and the ghost text history. With history, I often end up writing a line that isn't shell so that it fuzzy-matches what I'm looking for. I like having the passive suggestions in addition to that. It doesn't get in my way and if I like what I read, I can accept it.
I'd rather have a good history search than autosuggestion, but having both is a net-positive in my day-to-day.
The incompatible syntax of fish makes it a no go for me.
As an SRE, at my day job I often need to copy/paste commands that are generated from a playbook.
Our playbooks use Bash, and in practice Zsh is compatible. But a co-worker using fish often has to manually modify commands before running, and I'm not about that life.
The problem with fish is mostly the different syntax for setting variables and lack of heredocs. Sometimes the string substitution differences come up too.
Exactly. Variable assignment works different in Fish, and it’s very hard to change that habit. With my usage of shell (with Fzf & zoxide), fish simply doesn’t improve much for me. I’m using bash constantly for my job, and having the same syntax in my shell is important
Once you have everything figured out, you just keep using the config you have. It might be worth the investment. I stopped using oh-my-zsh when I realized it was what was causing multi-second delays on Raspberry Pis.
I think auto suggestions and syntax highlighting plugins can be installed separately from oh-my-zsh.
I use starship for a better prompt, and it works on more shells than just Zsh.
I also have Atuin installed to share history across machines, and as a benefit the history search is a lot more powerful.
I'm definitely not an expert, but I configure zsh manually with those fzf and "ghost text". I took some notes in my repo, just copy the relevant portions if you actually want to try this: https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/zsh
I tweak it occasionally, but for the most part I set it and forget it.
FWIW I only ever saw zsh at colleagues screen(share) with Oh-My-Zsh
1. Utterly slow and cluttered
2. Colleagues leverage a tenth of its power than what they could achieve with pure bare bones bash
Therefore, never bothered to even try (but had to fix some one liners so that they work on their fancy setup). Also, was surprised that macos switched to it as its default.
I guess I never jumped on the oh-my-it's-so-slow-zsh bandwagon. OTOH, fish+starship combo /that was also recommended here/ seems interesting
Starship can also be really really slow with the defaults, although that is not starship itself beings slow but it appears to sometimes call out to slow tools when display toolchain info.
I always turn all of the languages plugins off in Starship for this reason.
Honestly, I'm quite OK with bash+liquidprompt. It is probably an order of magnitude slower than these fancy new stuff.
Even with a huge monorepo and git stats displayed after every press of return it's OK (I win time at other places), but it's intriguing to have the same fast prompt display that I would otherwise have outside local git clone's directories.
What seems sexy about fish/starship is that there is built-in performance check / benchmark for slowdowns.
Quite possibly, but I use it daily with no issues. It’s also pretty easy to write your own prompt and then make it async with this plugin: https://github.com/acomagu/fish-async-prompt
If it works for you, that's great. But people are installing oh-my-zsh almost as if it's an official requirement of zsh, run into bloat and performance issues, and goes off telling everybody not to use zsh.
Some of the autocompletion settings set by oh-my-zsh are useful. But apart from that, the majority of the code consists of gazillions of random aliases and functions that someone else needed. It pollutes the command namespace for no good reason except maybe making users more wary of typos. The last time I checked, sudo was aliased as "please", and I can't find a single reason why that'd be useful.
oh-my-zsh also introduces a lot of churn, which is why it has autoupdates. Autoupdates. The only time I needed to change my configuration in vanilla zsh because of a change in zsh was once or maybe twice over a span of 10+ years.
OMZ shouldn’t be imposing these issues, and autoupdates of a shell script manager is aesthetically disgusting. But there’s also an argument to be made for not cargo culling configuration.
Came here to say this. I was able to get an omz featureset from vanilla zsh with a handful of lines of config. It works for the features I was using from omz.
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.
Thing is, a lot of how OMZ affects your zsh usage is based on usage patterns. For instance, I usually have zsh running in a terminal that is always open and running. Now, if I close my terminal and restart, then I notice that OMZ is kinda slow and it irritates me, even if it's only for a second. But that almost never happens.
Anyway, I'm going to be revisiting my zsh config soon and I'll be looking for ways to make sure I'm only using plugins that I absolutely do need. My principle in the past with workflows in zsh and Neovim is that I only add crucial plugins and try to keep my config minimal. Maybe I've gotten away from that a bit and need to regroup, so I find threads like this one useful to keep up with what's current.
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.
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 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.
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]
I did try to do my whole zsh config/theme from scratch, but it did take some time and lot of small features here and there were no worth the effort (like python version, vevn, and such) so I just switched to starship which is very fast and easy to use
In fact, sometimes I open bash even from zsh. When pasting from a script and debugging why something doesn't work as expected, I don't want bash-like. For ad-hoc loops, bash-like works well for me thanks to the familiarity of syntax.
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.
I find that for persistent configuration like this, it helps to use the long option format and include the man page contents for those options. I don’t have these options memorised so it’s good to have a reference handy to remind me.
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?
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.
It's just a shell prompt. There really won't be much in the way of bugs. And it's popular. Doing a quick scan of github issues, there's no shortage of questions where some other random plugin or weird terminal emulator has strange interactions. I think the author can be forgiven for not wanting to diagnose such combinations.
I'd be rather skeptical about the "fix" of updating the completion cache once a day only. Enabling oh-my-zsh already runs `compinit` and it does so after changing the function path in `fpath`. By running it again with a different `fpath` you invalidate the previous cache - meaning it builds a fresh cache twice every time you start zsh. If you use a plugin framework that already runs compinit, simply don't run it again separately. And make sure that `compinit` is only run after the final plugin or whatever has finished changing `fpath`. If you get that right, you'll only ever need to regenerate the cache when something actually updates.
I got tired of nvm being incredibly slow and recently switched to fnm, which has been much faster and has drop-in compatibility with the .nvmrc files that nvm used
The instant I saw the title I knew the post would be “I turned off oh-my-zsh” or “I tweaked oh-my-zsh.”
Yes zsh has a bunch of settings and dense documentation, and it can be hard to understand. The problem with something like oh-my-zsh is that now you have two things you don’t understand, and worse, when something doesn’t work you don’t know which one isn’t working or where to look.
Fish is the way to go! Used to be a fan of ZSH but also struggled with performance issues. No performance issue with Fish! Only issue might be plugins / some copy/paste bash stuff, but it's so worth the performance.
Sarcasm: just switch to bash and know what's running on every prompt. Sure, if you need to get git status on a slow disk then anything will be slow.
I have not read the article, BTW.
It turns out that it’s pretty annoying to have completely different fundamental syntax for something like variable assignment when so many things are the same. If I’m living in bash scripts half the time anyways, it’s just fundamentally annoying to accidentally type “foo=123” into fish and to get an error.
I started using fish on a dare from a coworker who thought it would be funny. Joke’s on them, it’s been five years and I still love it. Started using starship this year and agree with you.
Funnily enough, the startup delay of oh-my-zsh is exactly what prompted me to try out fish and eventually starship on top. I have not looked back as you say!
Ooh, bookmarked! My 11 year old zsh setup, which started from YADR and has stuff from other places preserved in chezmoi is starting to drag. Time to speed this up or just rip up and redo
Thanks - that pushed me to profile, and as others mentioned nvm was the biggest culprit, then powerline status, which i swapped to powerline-go. nice and snappy startup time now.
Definitely Mise! I was an asdf user for a couple of years and Mise was such a nice replacement. I have to juggle several other languages, and each having its own tool for tool version management was a non-starter.
From the post, it seems like ZSH tries to update on every shell spawn:
DISABLE_AUTO_UPDATE="true"
WTF? Even if we ignore the crime of non-critical software updating itself, the fact that it does it on every start instead of every day or week is insane.
I do not want my shell sending network requests to odd servers without explicit action from me, thanks.
That's what ZSH has turned into. Every new user installs OMZ because that's what the Internet tells them to do. Then their shell config turns into a huge mess.
So half the users are using OMZ with a bloated slow config and the other half are reinventing new config managers every year because of how terrible OMZ has become. And constantly churning through them as they keep getting abandoned.
I've been happily using zsh4humans for years but will need to find a replacement at some point as it's now going unmaintained too.
fwiw you can just use zsh4humans (as long as you promise not to bother the author) and have all the things in omz that matter and approximately zero startup time
As a long time Linux + bash user I switched to zsh three months ago when I was forced to use a Mac at a new job. In every previous job I was able to insist on Linux, but this one is very corporate. I decided not to fight it, except to install AltTab, Karabiner, Rectangle and a script that detects which screen my mouse is on so I can alt-tab through ALL the stuff on that screen (sane XFCE / KDE behaviour).
I can't get used to the atrocious keyboard shortcuts but I have gotten used to the "non-UK UK keyboard layout".
And zsh. I honestly don't know why I didn't just brew install bash right from the start. Without even realising I was doing it, I fought with this bloated bastard for 2 months before finally asking what the fuck I was doing.
About 20,000 entries in the Zsh history slowing it a little. All completion activated (but zcompile'd, along with a very large digraphs.zwc).
I think most would not be troubled by taking 1.06X longer, though, especially at this 8 ms scale and for interactive session initiation. Note this test upper bounds Time To First Prompt { a different "TTFP" from Time To First Plot ;-) }, since it also exits as part of the `-c`.
Pure zsh is alright, it's pretty much just bash with fantastic autocomplete that usually provides short form documentation right there along with the options. So no need to remember (or look up) what -X -d -f stands for. Get rid of oh-my-zsh and give the proper shell another chance.
If you've only compared against zsh's out-of-the-box completion then you're comparing against the fully backward compatible with how things were in 1993 state. Turn on compinit, and a half-dozen styles to enable descriptions at the very least. The content of `StartupFiles/zshrc` from zsh sources is more than enough, no need for a bloated framework like oh-my-zsh.
I'm being downvoted because I equated zsh with oh-my-zsh (or actually, maybe because I hate MacOS?), but if you look through the rest of the comments you'll notice that most people are asking for a lighter weight omz or wishing that some omz alternative hasn't been discontinued.
But think about trying to onboard with a shell. Imagine the type of help you'll get online, and where that inevitably pushes you. Consider these two things:
1. The number of people using pure zsh config Vs plugin systems like OMZ.
2. The number of people using pure bash config Vs some plugin system (can't even name one)....
With bash, when you try to figure out how to do something, the internet will usually spit out a snippet of pure bash. The same search on zsh will generally tell you which plugin you need to add to OMZ.
Zsh would likely be easier to adopt, and overall better off, if it didn't have an extremely bloated plugin system almost synonymous with it. I'm sure if I started from scratch with zsh years ago I'd have a great zshrc. Or if I had the time and energy to devote to getting zsh working to my taste without plugins, I'd do that. But vanilla zsh wasn't to my liking and I took, what seemed like, the path of least resistance. For a short while it I stuck it out, trying to gradually tweak it into shape. But I couldn't figure out how to correct some "fucking weird" behaviour, and digging into a bunch of insanely complex plugins was just way harder that looking at a zshrc. I eventually dumped the whole lot for bash and never looked back.
Could I have dumped OMZ and started clean? Yep. But I was tired, and bash works.
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.
I don't want to spend ages figuring out which knobs to turn to get a half decent shell. If there's an alternative to oh-my-zsh that looks halfway decent, has that nice fzf integrated, and the 'ghost text' history suggestions, then I welcome it!
If zsh has its completion fully configured by default, there will be no need for most people to turn knobs nor will it be a "half decent shell." It'll be the best shell, if it isn't already.
I wonder why ghost text history suggestions are popular though, I'd rather not have it. Shell history search works better, and I don't want my shell always showing me or whoever else is looking at the screen random commands that I've previously typed.
> If zsh has its completion fully configured by default, there will be no need for most people to turn knobs nor will it be a "half decent shell." It'll be the best shell, if it isn't already.
The curse of backward compatibility means that zsh does not break your setup or change things on you. And there are still developers left who bear the trauma from the one time that was tried back in the early-mid 90s in the 2.x version series. Sadly that means many new features remain inactive by default, especially anything written in shell-code like command-specific completions.
I for one use and like using both fzf on the search history and the ghost text history. With history, I often end up writing a line that isn't shell so that it fuzzy-matches what I'm looking for. I like having the passive suggestions in addition to that. It doesn't get in my way and if I like what I read, I can accept it.
I'd rather have a good history search than autosuggestion, but having both is a net-positive in my day-to-day.
You should try fish shell. Great user experience out of the box, including history suggestions.
https://fishshell.com
The incompatible syntax of fish makes it a no go for me.
As an SRE, at my day job I often need to copy/paste commands that are generated from a playbook.
Our playbooks use Bash, and in practice Zsh is compatible. But a co-worker using fish often has to manually modify commands before running, and I'm not about that life.
The problem with fish is mostly the different syntax for setting variables and lack of heredocs. Sometimes the string substitution differences come up too.
We have everything as scripts rather than one-liners so they work fine no matter which shell you're using.
Exactly. Variable assignment works different in Fish, and it’s very hard to change that habit. With my usage of shell (with Fzf & zoxide), fish simply doesn’t improve much for me. I’m using bash constantly for my job, and having the same syntax in my shell is important
I migrated from omz to zimfw and am reasonably happy.
But I have yet to meet anyone in real life who knows what zimfw is.
IMO, that alternative is Fish shell.
Zim has been my choice since I got sick of multi second startups with OMZ.
Once you have everything figured out, you just keep using the config you have. It might be worth the investment. I stopped using oh-my-zsh when I realized it was what was causing multi-second delays on Raspberry Pis.
I think auto suggestions and syntax highlighting plugins can be installed separately from oh-my-zsh.
I use starship for a better prompt, and it works on more shells than just Zsh.
I also have Atuin installed to share history across machines, and as a benefit the history search is a lot more powerful.
https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting
https://starship.rs
https://atuin.sh
I'm definitely not an expert, but I configure zsh manually with those fzf and "ghost text". I took some notes in my repo, just copy the relevant portions if you actually want to try this: https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/zsh
I tweak it occasionally, but for the most part I set it and forget it.
I noticed you're using `z-shell/F-Sy-H`, "Feature-rich Syntax Highlighting for Zsh".
The `z-shell` github org has (or had) some ... bad vibes, I would personally not use any of their code.
- https://recurse.social/@dylnuge/112224580867240812
- https://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/1c3r7ck/zshell...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/zsh/comments/1c3r5gn/zshellzi_users...
You could use `zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting` as an alternative.
You split your config across multiple files. That slows startup noticeably.
I don't know if it's still in vogue, but prezto exists.
Look into zgen, it's a zsh plugin system but much more static (but less ridiculous out of the box)
No shell does, I am using computers since 1986 and I don't these "pimp my shell" kind of stuff with rainbows and virtual pets.
CLI is for stuff that GUIs and IDEs for whatever reason don't support, or REPL like interactions.
The main thing I use the pimpshells for (and all I can honestly say is KNOW I’m using from omZ) is the colored/fancy prompts.
I’ve used colored informative prompts since DOS and having production servers be brilliantly red and dev servers a different color is quite helpful.
You don't need oh my zsh for colorful prompts though.
I had no idea zsh had decent completion. How does it compare to fish?
FWIW I only ever saw zsh at colleagues screen(share) with Oh-My-Zsh
1. Utterly slow and cluttered
2. Colleagues leverage a tenth of its power than what they could achieve with pure bare bones bash
Therefore, never bothered to even try (but had to fix some one liners so that they work on their fancy setup). Also, was surprised that macos switched to it as its default.
I guess I never jumped on the oh-my-it's-so-slow-zsh bandwagon. OTOH, fish+starship combo /that was also recommended here/ seems interesting
1. macOS switched to zsh for default shell, not zsh+oh-my-zsh
2. macOS switched from bash to zsh mainly because of GPLv3
Starship can also be really really slow with the defaults, although that is not starship itself beings slow but it appears to sometimes call out to slow tools when display toolchain info.
I always turn all of the languages plugins off in Starship for this reason.
Honestly, I'm quite OK with bash+liquidprompt. It is probably an order of magnitude slower than these fancy new stuff.
Even with a huge monorepo and git stats displayed after every press of return it's OK (I win time at other places), but it's intriguing to have the same fast prompt display that I would otherwise have outside local git clone's directories.
What seems sexy about fish/starship is that there is built-in performance check / benchmark for slowdowns.
For Fish, I'd recommend https://github.com/IlanCosman/tide instead
Oh nice thanks. Great idea with the async prompt update.
The repo hasn't seen new commits since more than a year, but new issues are still opened. Is it abandoned?
Quite possibly, but I use it daily with no issues. It’s also pretty easy to write your own prompt and then make it async with this plugin: https://github.com/acomagu/fish-async-prompt
Its been my experience too, they mainly want the eye candy of the prompt to compliment their macbook.
Out of curiosity, what is wrong with oh-my-zsh?
I use it and never had any issue. Am I missing out on something?
If it works for you, that's great. But people are installing oh-my-zsh almost as if it's an official requirement of zsh, run into bloat and performance issues, and goes off telling everybody not to use zsh.
Some of the autocompletion settings set by oh-my-zsh are useful. But apart from that, the majority of the code consists of gazillions of random aliases and functions that someone else needed. It pollutes the command namespace for no good reason except maybe making users more wary of typos. The last time I checked, sudo was aliased as "please", and I can't find a single reason why that'd be useful.
oh-my-zsh also introduces a lot of churn, which is why it has autoupdates. Autoupdates. The only time I needed to change my configuration in vanilla zsh because of a change in zsh was once or maybe twice over a span of 10+ years.
OMZ shouldn’t be imposing these issues, and autoupdates of a shell script manager is aesthetically disgusting. But there’s also an argument to be made for not cargo culling configuration.
Yep, many are just throwing shades at it. I combined omz with Antidote, which now gives me a fully featured shell and blazingly fast.
Plus, a lot of the goodies can be added with compiled programs like Starship or Atuin. Less config, faster, work across several shells.
Came here to say this. I was able to get an omz featureset from vanilla zsh with a handful of lines of config. It works for the features I was using from omz.
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.
Thing is, a lot of how OMZ affects your zsh usage is based on usage patterns. For instance, I usually have zsh running in a terminal that is always open and running. Now, if I close my terminal and restart, then I notice that OMZ is kinda slow and it irritates me, even if it's only for a second. But that almost never happens.
Anyway, I'm going to be revisiting my zsh config soon and I'll be looking for ways to make sure I'm only using plugins that I absolutely do need. My principle in the past with workflows in zsh and Neovim is that I only add crucial plugins and try to keep my config minimal. Maybe I've gotten away from that a bit and need to regroup, so I find threads like this one useful to keep up with what's current.
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:
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 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]
I think you're better off switching to https://starship.rs
I did try to do my whole zsh config/theme from scratch, but it did take some time and lot of small features here and there were no worth the effort (like python version, vevn, and such) so I just switched to starship which is very fast and easy to use
Why not just use fish at that point? It's been rewritten in Rust too.
To me personally, oh-my-zsh and similar projects feel like a worse version of the stuff fish brings by default.
Fish is awesome, but there are times you need POSIX/ bash-like shell syntax
Then you open bash and get POSIX and not bash-like, but bash.
In fact, sometimes I open bash even from zsh. When pasting from a script and debugging why something doesn't work as expected, I don't want bash-like. For ad-hoc loops, bash-like works well for me thanks to the familiarity of syntax.
You can use Antidote to selectively load the parts of OhMyZsh you need - https://github.com/getantidote/use-omz
My own usage: https://code.millironx.com/millironx/nix-dotfiles/src/commit...
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...
I am absolutely stealing this:
This is my config:
https://pastebin.com/ATZeFJRk
I find that for persistent configuration like this, it helps to use the long option format and include the man page contents for those options. I don’t have these options memorised so it’s good to have a reference handy to remind me.
What does this do exactly?
What's with the emoji alias?
Lol. Slipped in by accident, should never have been committed. Part of some messing around / test.
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/
OMZ should be classified under "supply chain attack as a service". I can't believe anyone uses it.
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 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
I moved to fish 3 years ago, haven't noticed a difference till date.
Fish school represent
you are wise and have good taste
https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k?tab=readme-ov-file#...
I've been using it for years now and I can't picture going back.
Sadly it's essentially discontinued
No. The author simply sees it as basically complete and decided to spend the time he has fixing bugs instead of taking care of issues.
> MOST BUGS WILL GO UNFIXED
It's just a shell prompt. There really won't be much in the way of bugs. And it's popular. Doing a quick scan of github issues, there's no shortage of questions where some other random plugin or weird terminal emulator has strange interactions. I think the author can be forgiven for not wanting to diagnose such combinations.
As a former maintainer of LiquidPrompt I can only agree.
I'll continue using it until the core features like instant prompt and transient prompt start to break or I run into bugs that I can't live with
this is the answer
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.
I'd be rather skeptical about the "fix" of updating the completion cache once a day only. Enabling oh-my-zsh already runs `compinit` and it does so after changing the function path in `fpath`. By running it again with a different `fpath` you invalidate the previous cache - meaning it builds a fresh cache twice every time you start zsh. If you use a plugin framework that already runs compinit, simply don't run it again separately. And make sure that `compinit` is only run after the final plugin or whatever has finished changing `fpath`. If you get that right, you'll only ever need to regenerate the cache when something actually updates.
I do find myself running into problems with NVM slowing things down in zsh; anyone else experiencing this?
I got tired of nvm being incredibly slow and recently switched to fnm, which has been much faster and has drop-in compatibility with the .nvmrc files that nvm used
I switched from Oh My Zsh to ZimFW because they have benchmarks showing it is faster: https://github.com/zimfw/zimfw
The instant I saw the title I knew the post would be “I turned off oh-my-zsh” or “I tweaked oh-my-zsh.”
Yes zsh has a bunch of settings and dense documentation, and it can be hard to understand. The problem with something like oh-my-zsh is that now you have two things you don’t understand, and worse, when something doesn’t work you don’t know which one isn’t working or where to look.
Fish is the way to go! Used to be a fan of ZSH but also struggled with performance issues. No performance issue with Fish! Only issue might be plugins / some copy/paste bash stuff, but it's so worth the performance.
Sarcasm: just switch to bash and know what's running on every prompt. Sure, if you need to get git status on a slow disk then anything will be slow. I have not read the article, BTW.
Fish shell with starship. You will never look back.
Fish is nice, but syntax difference is a no-go for me. I frequently log into different servers that usually use bash.
I miss simple things like alias when I temporary want to assign long commands to a shorter alias.
I still script in bash and I still know bash. It’s just not that big an ordeal to code-switch between the two.
It turns out that it’s pretty annoying to have completely different fundamental syntax for something like variable assignment when so many things are the same. If I’m living in bash scripts half the time anyways, it’s just fundamentally annoying to accidentally type “foo=123” into fish and to get an error.
If I could use fish without set, maybe I would
I started using fish on a dare from a coworker who thought it would be funny. Joke’s on them, it’s been five years and I still love it. Started using starship this year and agree with you.
Funnily enough, the startup delay of oh-my-zsh is exactly what prompted me to try out fish and eventually starship on top. I have not looked back as you say!
My fish config is maybe 5-10 lines just starship, zoxide, direnv.
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What's the benefit of using oh-my-zsh and starship at the same time?
> Making Spaceship Prompt Faster (22.47% → ~5%)
Or even better switch to starship, a compiled binary doing the prompt formatting?
Ooh, bookmarked! My 11 year old zsh setup, which started from YADR and has stuff from other places preserved in chezmoi is starting to drag. Time to speed this up or just rip up and redo
Thanks - that pushed me to profile, and as others mentioned nvm was the biggest culprit, then powerline status, which i swapped to powerline-go. nice and snappy startup time now.
same here, nvm was absolutely wrecking my startup time and I almost never use npm/nodejs.
Aha! Now I know that nvm was slowing my shell startup down. Now I've reconfigured .zshrc to lazy-load nvm, and everything's snappy:
You should try switching to mise. I tried fnm too which was an improvement but mise does the same as fast and supports essentially every language
Definitely Mise! I was an asdf user for a couple of years and Mise was such a nice replacement. I have to juggle several other languages, and each having its own tool for tool version management was a non-starter.
Just use fnm, I like it much better
Cool! Also, there's a zsh wrapper for nvm:
https://github.com/lukechilds/zsh-nvm?tab=readme-ov-file#laz...
Same. I switched to fnm.
From the post, it seems like ZSH tries to update on every shell spawn:
WTF? Even if we ignore the crime of non-critical software updating itself, the fact that it does it on every start instead of every day or week is insane.I do not want my shell sending network requests to odd servers without explicit action from me, thanks.
>it seems like ZSH tries to update on every shell spawn
Learn your tools first, not bloated frameworks. There's a gulf of difference between vanilla zsh and this:
>Community-driven (with 2,400+ contributors) framework for managing your zsh configuration
>Includes 300+ optional plugins (rails, git, macOS, hub, docker, homebrew, node, php, python, etc)
>140+ themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community
Sorry, I meant oh-my-zsh. I know that the core shell doesn't update.
I still think it's bad. You shouldn't rely on a million different package managers, just 1 is enough. (2 if you are feeling spicy: Flatpak)
That's what ZSH has turned into. Every new user installs OMZ because that's what the Internet tells them to do. Then their shell config turns into a huge mess.
So half the users are using OMZ with a bloated slow config and the other half are reinventing new config managers every year because of how terrible OMZ has become. And constantly churning through them as they keep getting abandoned.
I've been happily using zsh4humans for years but will need to find a replacement at some point as it's now going unmaintained too.
oh-my-zsh, not zsh
fwiw you can just use zsh4humans (as long as you promise not to bother the author) and have all the things in omz that matter and approximately zero startup time
make sure you haven't got too many plugins enabled (start with zero and work up / enable them as needed)
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easier to switch to fish
As a long time Linux + bash user I switched to zsh three months ago when I was forced to use a Mac at a new job. In every previous job I was able to insist on Linux, but this one is very corporate. I decided not to fight it, except to install AltTab, Karabiner, Rectangle and a script that detects which screen my mouse is on so I can alt-tab through ALL the stuff on that screen (sane XFCE / KDE behaviour).
I can't get used to the atrocious keyboard shortcuts but I have gotten used to the "non-UK UK keyboard layout".
And zsh. I honestly don't know why I didn't just brew install bash right from the start. Without even realising I was doing it, I fought with this bloated bastard for 2 months before finally asking what the fuck I was doing.
I sped up my shell by switching back to bash.
What on earth are you talking about? zsh isn't bloated by any stretch, nor is it any slower than bash in any meaningful way.
Chances are, like in the article, you installed oh-my-zsh, a third party configuration framework.
Some data in support of @soraminazuki (who makes good points throughout this thread) on an i7-1370P linux laptop running Linux 6.15.7:
(Using https://github.com/c-blake/bu/blob/main/doc/tim.md)About 20,000 entries in the Zsh history slowing it a little. All completion activated (but zcompile'd, along with a very large digraphs.zwc).
I think most would not be troubled by taking 1.06X longer, though, especially at this 8 ms scale and for interactive session initiation. Note this test upper bounds Time To First Prompt { a different "TTFP" from Time To First Plot ;-) }, since it also exits as part of the `-c`.
Pure zsh is alright, it's pretty much just bash with fantastic autocomplete that usually provides short form documentation right there along with the options. So no need to remember (or look up) what -X -d -f stands for. Get rid of oh-my-zsh and give the proper shell another chance.
I actually like bash's autocomplete better (maybe there's a way to configure how zsh does it, I haven't looked into it).
If you've only compared against zsh's out-of-the-box completion then you're comparing against the fully backward compatible with how things were in 1993 state. Turn on compinit, and a half-dozen styles to enable descriptions at the very least. The content of `StartupFiles/zshrc` from zsh sources is more than enough, no need for a bloated framework like oh-my-zsh.
Yeah I'm comparing bash-completion with compinit (at least I think so). I just didn't really like how it "picks" an option for you
I'm being downvoted because I equated zsh with oh-my-zsh (or actually, maybe because I hate MacOS?), but if you look through the rest of the comments you'll notice that most people are asking for a lighter weight omz or wishing that some omz alternative hasn't been discontinued.
But think about trying to onboard with a shell. Imagine the type of help you'll get online, and where that inevitably pushes you. Consider these two things: 1. The number of people using pure zsh config Vs plugin systems like OMZ. 2. The number of people using pure bash config Vs some plugin system (can't even name one)....
With bash, when you try to figure out how to do something, the internet will usually spit out a snippet of pure bash. The same search on zsh will generally tell you which plugin you need to add to OMZ.
Zsh would likely be easier to adopt, and overall better off, if it didn't have an extremely bloated plugin system almost synonymous with it. I'm sure if I started from scratch with zsh years ago I'd have a great zshrc. Or if I had the time and energy to devote to getting zsh working to my taste without plugins, I'd do that. But vanilla zsh wasn't to my liking and I took, what seemed like, the path of least resistance. For a short while it I stuck it out, trying to gradually tweak it into shape. But I couldn't figure out how to correct some "fucking weird" behaviour, and digging into a bunch of insanely complex plugins was just way harder that looking at a zshrc. I eventually dumped the whole lot for bash and never looked back.
Could I have dumped OMZ and started clean? Yep. But I was tired, and bash works.