Speeding Up My ZSH Shell

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

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...

[delayed]

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.

Fish shell with starship. You will never look back.

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/

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.

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.

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:

  zstyle ':omz:plugins:nvm' lazy yes

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.