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Comment by mbell | Hacker News Reader

Opening a new shell can take ~5s with oh-my-zsh, it's <1s with prezto. Tab completion is also noticeably slower with oh-my-zsh.

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> Opening a new shell can take ~5s with oh-my-zsh

Heh. I remember when zsh first got its fancy completion system, compinit would add so long to zsh startup on the dinky little machines of the day that people literally started adding progress bars and the like to their zshrc.

I stuck with the old-style completion for a long time.

Have you cleared out your ~/.zsh_history recently? I periodically need to reset mine to increase init time.

Nope. I increased the limit from 5000 to 10000 a while back and not seen any noticeable difference in performance.

Hm. I'll take a look at Prezto then. For me a new shell takes approx .5 seconds and tab completion is instant, but I'm on a 2014 MacBook Pro and use iTerm2 instead of the native terminal (not sure if that makes any difference). I don't recall it being any worse on the 2012 MacBook Air + iTerm2 I had previously, but maybe I just didn't know any better.

No it's noticeable. There is no hesitation in the responses. I recently switched because I setup something for Emacs which needed to run a shell on start up and I noticed just how slow it was because Emacs is not Async and would hang for that shell to boot to run a simple command.

On a side note, while prezto is faster, another culprit of slowness is nvm which when I disabled it made the terminal much faster to load.

...

nvm has been the thing slowing down my terminal loads?

Thanks.

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