Oh My Zsh adds bloat • Hacker News Board

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#141

Post by TurboSkyline » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 8:49 AM UTC

eddythompson80 wrote: post #134

rukshn wrote: post #123

I switched to fish shell with star ship. Fish has autocomplete and syntax highlighting out of the box which is quite neat and the main features I use in omgzh so fish was a safe choice for me https://ruky.me/moving-from-zsh-to-fish-nixos-darwin/

Fish is also not POSIX which has always been its, and my, issue. I use zsh+starship and my own very minimal init stuff+zsh autocomplete and syntaxhighlihg plugins. It’s not a perfect setup. I wish fish would “just work” but it doesn’t. Frequently I had to look up for “workarounds” for my setup. 25 years in, I think I got it and i just keep my zshrc and `machine-init.sh` on point for my-own-style-experience. I think a…

> Fish is also not POSIX which has always been its, and my, issue

Could you give some examples of issues you encountered because of that? I've been using fish for about 8 years now I can't remember an instance where that was a problem in interactive use.

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#142

Post by bstar77 » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 8:59 AM UTC

Am I the only one that uses ohmyposh with fish? I have a killer custom posh theme that I’ve been using for years and the performance is fantastic.

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#143

Post by GCUMstlyHarmls » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 8:59 AM UTC

rukshn wrote: post #123

I switched to fish shell with star ship. Fish has autocomplete and syntax highlighting out of the box which is quite neat and the main features I use in omgzh so fish was a safe choice for me https://ruky.me/moving-from-zsh-to-fish-nixos-darwin/

Yeah. I used zsh for decades, invested a reasonable amount of emotion and time in my config but swapped to fish last year as a sort of January trial and it stuck.

It's not perfect, the lack of HEREDOCs are annoying sometimes, and no background-able blocks (eg `{x}&`) means you can't async things as easily in scripts.

Zsh has a lot of advanced stuff (at least for a shell) that can deliver pretty complex scripting such as throw/catching, mountains of variable flags and switches which I do miss when I write fish scripts but really -- I've abused them a lot over the years and now days I would be more likely to just use a "builds to a single binary" language.

I will probably swap to nushell when it gets a bit more stable (in my experience it's runtime is stable, but it's feature set / command names are still shaking out. I really like it's general ideas though in terms operating on structured data.

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#144

Post by inapis » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:03 AM UTC

baby wrote: post #53

FrenchTouch42 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try https://starship.rs then. Starship gives you the same "drop in and go" experience but without the 200ms+ prompt lag. One curl -> one line in your rc file, works on zsh/bash/fish/whatever. Configuration is straightforward and easy imo: https://starship.rs/config/ Give it a spin, I think you won't regret it.

Oh my zsh makes installing extension so easy, just edit .zshrc and add extract, fzf, z, etc. To the list of plugins

What? You still have to install the binary via your package manager. Most OMZ plugins are basically a bunch of shell completions or aliases.

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#145

Post by ku1ik » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:04 AM UTC

TurboSkyline wrote: post #141

eddythompson80 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fish is also not POSIX which has always been its, and my, issue. I use zsh+starship and my own very minimal init stuff+zsh autocomplete and syntaxhighlihg plugins. It’s not a perfect setup. I wish fish would “just work” but it doesn’t. Frequently I had to look up for “workarounds” for my setup. 25 years in, I think I got it and i just keep my zshrc and `machine-init.sh` on point for my-own-style-experience. I think a…

> Fish is also not POSIX which has always been its, and my, issue Could you give some examples of issues you encountered because of that? I've been using fish for about 8 years now I can't remember an instance where that was a problem in interactive use.

Same here. More than 5 years with fish and it’s been like 5 times when not-POSIX was an “issue”, which I’ve been solving by temporarily entering bash and rerunning the command there.

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#146

Post by Hammershaft » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:12 AM UTC

CjHuber wrote: post #96

FrenchTouch42 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try https://starship.rs then. Starship gives you the same "drop in and go" experience but without the 200ms+ prompt lag. One curl -> one line in your rc file, works on zsh/bash/fish/whatever. Configuration is straightforward and easy imo: https://starship.rs/config/ Give it a spin, I think you won't regret it.

I'm so glad I switched to fish, I'd rather have genuinely good settings out of the box rather than endless configuration, and honestly it's much better out of the box than any configuration I've ever had. Only drawback is that it's not POSIX, no issue for me, but maybe for people who have a lot of muscle memory with bash.

Fish is just excellent out of the box. It's a little tragic how path dependent we are on flawed terminal experiences designed 40 years ago.

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#147

Post by xlii » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:14 AM UTC

Dunno.

I have 90 lines zsh config with 3 plugins (compinit, vcs-info, edit-command-line) and startup-exit sequence takes 0.32s.

You learn very quickly where the lags come though when you work on a big old repository (I learned this on Emacs source code) where getting current branch for jujutsu takes ~5 second. Git is faster in this regard but it still is ~0.3s

I'm not fan of starship (I don't use fancy command line variables in general) but many of those issues can be dealt with awesome bkt caching utility [0]. Instead of live reading just let bkt cache it with long TTL with eager async refreshes. My guess is that Starship does exactly that.

[0]: https://github.com/dimo414/bkt

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#148

Post by Fnoord » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:16 AM UTC

CjHuber wrote: post #96

FrenchTouch42 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try https://starship.rs then. Starship gives you the same "drop in and go" experience but without the 200ms+ prompt lag. One curl -> one line in your rc file, works on zsh/bash/fish/whatever. Configuration is straightforward and easy imo: https://starship.rs/config/ Give it a spin, I think you won't regret it.

I'm so glad I switched to fish, I'd rather have genuinely good settings out of the box rather than endless configuration, and honestly it's much better out of the box than any configuration I've ever had. Only drawback is that it's not POSIX, no issue for me, but maybe for people who have a lot of muscle memory with bash.

I've been using fish for nearly 10 years.

First, there are some ways to make fish more compatible with bash.

If you want to do some shell scripting in fish, or running other people's shell scripts (or commands) this may aid you since you wouldn't have to port them (or take less time to port them over).

You can achieve this with a plugin system such as 'oh my fish' or 'fisher'. But, as always, it adds complexity (and bloat :P), you'll need it on every fish shell (including remote systems), etc.

It is a bit akin to having nvim with plugins versus being able to use vi. Sometimes, you're going to need to be able to use the latter.

Also, to people who recently adopted fish: fish has been made more and more compatible with bash throughout those years.

FWIW, I use fish with starship these days.

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#149

Post by forgotpwd16 » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:17 AM UTC

TurboSkyline wrote: post #141

eddythompson80 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fish is also not POSIX which has always been its, and my, issue. I use zsh+starship and my own very minimal init stuff+zsh autocomplete and syntaxhighlihg plugins. It’s not a perfect setup. I wish fish would “just work” but it doesn’t. Frequently I had to look up for “workarounds” for my setup. 25 years in, I think I got it and i just keep my zshrc and `machine-init.sh` on point for my-own-style-experience. I think a…

> Fish is also not POSIX which has always been its, and my, issue Could you give some examples of issues you encountered because of that? I've been using fish for about 8 years now I can't remember an instance where that was a problem in interactive use.

Issue is the cognitive overhead to know 2 distinct shell languages. One you use, and one (almost) everyone else uses. If later isn't of your concern and Fish is all you interact with then no issue whatsoever for interactive or/and scripting use.

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#150

Post by eddythompson80 » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:18 AM UTC

TurboSkyline wrote: post #141

eddythompson80 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fish is also not POSIX which has always been its, and my, issue. I use zsh+starship and my own very minimal init stuff+zsh autocomplete and syntaxhighlihg plugins. It’s not a perfect setup. I wish fish would “just work” but it doesn’t. Frequently I had to look up for “workarounds” for my setup. 25 years in, I think I got it and i just keep my zshrc and `machine-init.sh` on point for my-own-style-experience. I think a…

> Fish is also not POSIX which has always been its, and my, issue Could you give some examples of issues you encountered because of that? I've been using fish for about 8 years now I can't remember an instance where that was a problem in interactive use.

For me it’s always been an inability to “copy this command from stackoverflow” (or in the modern day, it’ll be copy this from ChatGPT) into your shell. Maybe it’s better now, but the last time I seriously gave fish a chance was 2014.

Also one of may main use case is documenting things other developers can do to make their life easier. There are handful of things where zsh behaves differently than bash. And while those handful of thins are not even a POSIX or shell things, they often come up.

The reality is, every day I’m fighting with “developers” who don’t know what the difference between AWS, Linux, and bash is. Throwing “fish” into the mix seems like I’m just being obtuse for no reason. I have sept hours trying to explain to some dumbass that git-bash on windows is not the same thing as Linux only for them to call me “oh he really cares about ‘bash’”-guy. While claiming they are “Linux developers” as they use macOS.