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 viI 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.
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:
export LESS='-RX --mouse --quit-if-one-screen'What's with the emoji alias?
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.
Fish school represent
you are wise and have good taste
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.
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.
> Making Spaceship Prompt Faster (22.47% → ~5%)
Or even better switch to starship, a compiled binary doing the prompt formatting?
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 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.
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
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
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.
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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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.
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.
easier to switch to fish
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 yesYou 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
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:
DISABLE_AUTO_UPDATE="true"
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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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.
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.
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:
$ tim 'bash -lic logout' 'zsh -lic logout'
55.3 +- 3.7 μs (AlreadySubtracted)Overhead
7454 +- 26 μs bash -lic logout
7934 +- 39 μs zsh -lic logout
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`.
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.
IMO, that alternative is Fish shell.
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.
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'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.
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
Zim has been my choice since I got sick of multi second startups with OMZ.
Look into zgen, it's a zsh plugin system but much more static (but less ridiculous out of the box)
I don't know if it's still in vogue, but prezto exists.
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.
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.