Oh My Zsh adds bloat • Hacker News Board

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#301

Post by DanOpcode » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 10:11 PM UTC

syhol wrote: post #190

DanOpcode wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Asdf too. Have heard well about Mise, but I haven't figured out what the difference is, so I have stayed with Asdf

Mise started out using the same plugins as asdf, mostly focused on adding performance and usability improvements. Over time it added more features and security. Most tools are now directly fetched from github releases without the need for random shell scripts (which is what asdf plugins are). It also grew to be a task runner and environment manager. At first you might think this is scope creep but they're both opt in…

I will check it out! Thanks for the explanation! Sounds really neat

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#302

Post by niek_pas » Fri, Jan 16, 2026, 9:55 AM UTC

eddd-ddde wrote: post #259

mikkupikku wrote: post #202

Exactly why I switched to fish. Fish doesn't come preconfigured exactly how I would like, but it's close enough that I just grew accustomed to fish defaults and have no trouble with it now, and no longer give any thought to shell configuration.

Really curious what is missing from the default configuration in your setup. If I'm feeling really fancy I may enable vim bindings and add the fuzzy find plugin, but plain fish is so good on its own.

Not OP, but I just switched to Fish and immediately had to find community plugins for both `z` and `!!`/`!$`. Yes, Fish has alt+up/down to navigate arguments, but I have 15 years of muscle memory pointing to `!$`.

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#303

Post by baby » Fri, Jan 16, 2026, 10:12 AM UTC

inapis wrote: post #144

baby wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some are built in

Re: Oh My Zsh adds bloat

#304

Post by arionmiles » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

You only notice this stuff if you use shell very often, and practically live in the command line. Since I started my career I've been using omz and a fresh install is always snappy but over time it starts getting slow.

Debugging/profiling why it's gotten slow has mostly been an uphill battle for me. I tried using zprof which pointed that compdef and compinit were culprits. I tried changing my config to calculate compinit only once a day since most people reported it to work, but it never worked. This kind of stuff pokes and stabs at you endlessly.

OMZ being shell, and being a maze of a codebase, I couldn't track down if and where compinit was being called from even after the config change above, because all profilers pointed to the possibility of compinit being called twice.

I gave up and started using barebones zsh + starship because I do need a good prompt. Yet the issues persisted.

I recently started using fish + starship on my local machine so that I could evaluate it before committing to it at work. It's the fastest shell so far (maybe because its new, I intend to find out).

My only painpoint now is I have a bunch of utility functions I've maintained in bash that I need to port to fish because of the posix incompatibility.

OMZ is absolutely bloat.