Oh My Zsh adds bloat • Hacker News Board

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#151

Post by totetsu » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:18 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.

It’s only takes a second to run a child bash shell when you need something posix

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#152

Post by forgotpwd16 » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:25 AM UTC

jbirnick wrote: post #8

They complain about a startup time of 380ms, but with the default configuration it's only 60ms on my laptop. That's faster than the final startup time of 70ms of their custom config, and it has all the features that they added to their config. So with all the features they need OMZ should be fast enough for them? I don't get it.

Startup time depends on hardware and (assume) features you're enabling. Better hardware and less features, less lag.

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#153

Post by esseph » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:29 AM UTC

g947o wrote: post #4

I use oh my zsh for exactly one reason: I can get a good shell experience out of the box and immediately start working on stuff productively, whether it's a new machine, a new remote host or a container. I could spend hours figuring out all those things, bit I'd rather use that time for something more important.

I just use fish shell. Way easier.

https://fishshell.com/

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#154

Post by esseph » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:31 AM UTC

Fnoord wrote: post #148

CjHuber wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I'm in fish and I want to run a bash script I just... call it with bash :-)

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#155

Post by forrestthewoods » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:39 AM UTC

This thread feels so foreign to me. I use basic ass vanilla Windows terminal. It’s fine. I also use the vanilla built-in to VSCode terminal. It is also fine.

Terminals are such a small, unimportant part of my job I barely even think about them.

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#156

Post by dagi3d » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:40 AM UTC

Zarel wrote: post #138

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 surprised Starship is so popular. It's missing really basic powerlevel10k features like empty segments. If you look at some examples: https://starship.rs/presets/gruvbox-rainbow You can see that when the segments are empty, they still appear as a 1-width segment, rather than entirely disappearing. It also makes you configure many things by hand. powerlevel10k has an interactive wizard that lets you design your pr…

Starship allows empty segments, I in this specific case it's just how the preset/theme works as it uses the Unicode character as separator and it needs to set the background and foreground colors depending on which modules is surrounded by

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#157

Post by RMPR » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:48 AM UTC

> For Vim users, I also suggest enabling Vim mode in Zsh. It makes editing commands much faster.

I am also an avid Vim user but I disagree. The default readline is perfectly fine for single line commands (you do have to know your way around some basic commands though C-a/u/k/l/w...). To edit long commands in $EDITOR you can always do C-x C-e in bash/zsh (M-v in Fish). As a matter of fact everytime I pair program with my colleague I always think he is editing those short commands slower than I would have because he has to change modes all the time.

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#158

Post by obsoleetorr » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:49 AM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #31

Well yeah, you need antibody https://getantibody.github.io/ and then whatever plugins you desire. Been using it for years and it's never been anything other than fast and reliable.

github says in maintenance since 2022 and that users should move to next great thing, antidote

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#159

Post by mirzap » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:51 AM UTC

FrenchTouch42 wrote: post #38

g947o wrote: post #4

I use oh my zsh for exactly one reason: I can get a good shell experience out of the box and immediately start working on stuff productively, whether it's a new machine, a new remote host or a container. I could spend hours figuring out all those things, bit I'd rather use that time for something more important.

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 tried using Starship, and it’s clearly faster than Oh My Zsh, but my issue was that I relied on some useful Oh My Zsh features that I didn’t know how to replicate in Starship. One of these is history filtering - for example, when I type source and press the up arrow, I only see previously run source commands, which makes it easy to find what I’m looking for. I tried to get this working in Starship, but had no luck.

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#160

Post by binaryturtle » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:55 AM UTC

mezyt wrote: post #126

shevy-java wrote: post #112

> The main problem with Oh My Zsh is that it adds a lot of unnecessary bloat that affects shell startup time. Wowsers! That +0.5 seconds delay will kill cats everywhere. We must microoptimise the startup time of shells!!! Or ... we could simply use bash and KDE konsole with, say, 10 tabs. That setup works for me since ages; admittedly I use bash just as a wrapper for simple actions as well as calling a gazillion of a…

Plus, how many shell can one individual open in a day ? I'm doing that once per day on a good day, maybe twenty if I have a lot of unplanned work on subprojects that needs to be done concurrently with my main task.

Sometimes hundreds per day. Tabs come and go here. People have different workflows.

Yesterday just shy over 50, according to entries from `login` in the system log.

I do launch multiple interpreters just to get a fancy coloful cowsay on each launch. Which involves the fortune program, lolcat (via ruby) and cowsay itself (via Perl). I probably should optimise that into a single C binary for better startup times! :)