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Comment by fnj | Hacker News Reader

xonsh is the only shell you need. It is far and away the best of all.

I so wanted to like xonsh, but the startup time is too slow. I keep spawing new shells every now and then for every little task. When I'm done with the task, I close it. Xonsh has noticeable startup delays.

I don't have a taste for pulldown terminals.

Sorry to hear you ran into problems. Start up time is pretty fast for me (~0.1-0.2 s). If it is slower than a second, I am very concerned. Please open an issue (with the results of the xonfig) so we can work through what is going wrong. Your workflow sounds similar to mine.

As per the pulldown terminals, do you mean the dropdown menus? If so this can be avoided by using the readline shell instead of the prompt-toolkit one.

Thank you for the response! For me, the startup time ranges between 0.3-0.45 seconds. I have an old i5 3rd Gen processor. Presumably, your system is faster. This should give you an idea of the timing of my shells, compared to the latest git checkout of xonsh:

    % for i in dash mksh zsh bash xonsh; do; /usr/bin/time $i -c /usr/bin/ls; done
    0.00user 0.00system 0:00.00elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 1884maxresident)k
    0inputs+0outputs (0major+127minor)pagefaults 0swaps
    0.00user 0.00system 0:00.00elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 1820maxresident)k
    0inputs+0outputs (0major+136minor)pagefaults 0swaps
    0.00user 0.00system 0:00.00elapsed 50%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 3204maxresident)k
    0inputs+0outputs (0major+251minor)pagefaults 0swaps
    0.00user 0.00system 0:00.00elapsed 60%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 3092maxresident)k
    0inputs+0outputs (0major+244minor)pagefaults 0swaps
    0.41user 0.06system 0:00.48elapsed 100%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 58768maxresident)k
    0inputs+24outputs (0major+22347minor)pagefaults 0swaps

Do you think the difference is large enough to warrant a bug report?

I don't mean dropdown menus; "pulldown" was my misnomer. I meant dropdown terminal emulators like Guake, Terminator, Yakuake, etc. They are meant to be running in the background, and swoop down on pressing a hot key, inspired by "~" opening a console in Quake games.

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