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I have experienced even longer with npm / Node.js autocompletion.

The whole experience caused me to try different shells, I ended up on ksh for simplicity and comparative leanness, works well for my needs.

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But zsh is not slow, bloat you add to it is...

I agree. I never found zsh inherently slow, but the reason I initially used it was to play with all the additional 'bloat' its ecosystem offered, so to speak.

It was that experience which led me to look try other shells, in the end I found ksh's simpler feature set and manpage more to my liking.

Which ksh flavour? Also any good tutorial?

I have used the original ksh[1] for years, because it seem to have more features for complex shell scripts. It also supports real numbers for people that need math functions other than integer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KornShell

The ksh that ships with OpenBSD, it's available under Linux as loksh. I've never needed a tutorial as such, because found its man page to be well written and comprehensive. However, I can recommend the old book The Unix Programming Environment by Kernighan and Pike, it also is well written and helped me quite a bit. Just understanding one smaller tool (ksh) better has helped me do more with it and use fewer addons extensions, which personally make me happy; works for me.

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