D'Oh My Zsh – How I unexpectedly built a monster of an open source project

oh-my-zsh is noticeably slower than prezto on multiple 'high end' machines I have with the same 'capabilities', i.e. plugins that provide the same feature set on both.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11349316

It's meant to give you a lot of sensible (think like vim-sensible) defaults as well as the settings that make it feel more like bash yet show the awesome features of zsh.

A lot of people don't like to configure shells. omz gives them a head start and a source of inspiration into features they might not know.

Edit: to clarify what I mean by the distinction being artificial, I don't see why you couldn't think of the kernel as someone else's configuration for your processor, or zsh itself as someone else's configuration for your terminal window.

You must have a lot of expensive stuff crammed into your config.fish file, for me fish takes < 1 second to init.

Greatly disagree on the fish startup time, for me it takes approximately the same time as bash. Can't comment on zsh though.

https://github.com/Bash-it/bash-it

I actually find it valuable to nuke my bashrc customisations every few years and reevaluate. Assumptions and practices entrenched in those customisations can be anti-patterns or counterproductive.

I've been using basically that config ever since.

When I first started using zsh I went down the road of writing custom completion functions, but pretty quickly discovered that they just didn't pay off in the long run and stopped doing it. My shell absolutely doesn't take 5s+ to open up either, it's pretty much instantaneous.

In bad news, it appears Ubuntu no longer ships the manpages for zsh and instead ships info pages. Barf.

This. The key to using Emacs well is to start with something fairly basic. Whenever you find some behavior that annoys you, take a few minutes to figure out how to fix it once and for all in your config. After a few years you will end up with a giant mess of a config that makes Emacs behave almost exactly the way you want, which you can copy over to any machine where you do serious work. You will also be able to get basic work done in a vanilla `/usr/bin/emacs`.

FWIW, after several years of zsh, I've been mostly happy with a stock fish in a terminal. It's way less broken by default than either zsh or (ugh) eshell.

Aren't you already doing that when you load up a vanilla zsh? Its just that that "somebody else" was the guy that wrote the tool. In either case, you still will want to tweak it to get exactly what you want.

However, in one of the cases, the thing you start out with is 0 features, and an extra week of work doing the same thing that thousands of people have done exactly the same before you. Only after that do you get to making it really "custom"

I don't see a problem with any of those as long as you have a mental model of how the 'shortcuts' you've configured work.

There's no shame in customizing shortcuts. Isn't that the entire point of emacs?

That said, if a tool gives you a net productivity boost, you should probably adopt it. I'm pretty sure I was working with Robby when he started down this road. (Hi Robby!)

I find that I mostly use systems that I can make match my setup...

And when you ssh into another machine, or have to use a different machine, well you're just as slow as other people using no config at all.

Personally, I just built my own zsh config that solves my problems without all the framework mess. Its less than 150 lines + some related dot files for aliases, vim, etc.

If you're worried about the project stagnating, why don't you offer to donate some cash? Why not offer to help in whatever way you can, even if it's just triaging tickets?

Try these things in bash (with completions installed):

1. cd to a git repository and type "git [TAB]". Do you see a list of git-specific completions?

2. cd to a directory that has a makefile and type "make [TAB]" do you see a bunch of make targets?

3. cd to a directory that has some PDF files and some other files. Type "okular [TAB]" (or whatever you use to view PDF's. Do you see just the PDF files as completions?

4. Same as 3, but try other programs like python, perl, etc. How well do bash completions keep up with zsh completions?

I'd be very surprised if bash supports completions for programs that zsh has missed.

In general, switching from bash is very easy. Your muscle-memory from bash transfers very well to zsh. You may want to change the prompt to look similar to your bash prompt, so you'll feel at home. Translating my bashrc and bashprofile took just a few minutes.

I tried oh-my-zsh and it did not feel right for me. If this is the reason you're switching, all I can say is that zsh offers benefits even without it.