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]

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

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...

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.

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.

Fish shell with starship. You will never look back.

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.

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/

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.

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

make sure you haven't got too many plugins enabled (start with zero and work up / enable them as needed)

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 vi

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

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

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.