Leveraging frameworks like oh-my-zsh can enrich your shell experience, but overloading it with plugins might slow things down. Keeping your .zshrc file lean can significantly enhance startup times and overall performance. Profiling your shell is a good start to figuring out what is slowing it down.
Zprof is a utility that comes packaged with zsh, which you can use to profile your zsh script.
Add the following to the top of your .zshrc file to load zprof:
if [[ -n "$ZSH_DEBUGRC" ]]; then
zmodload zsh/zprof
fi
And this at the bottom:
if [[ -n "$ZSH_DEBUGRC" ]]; then
zprof
fi
To profile your .zshrc script and print a summary of all the commands run during your shell startup and the time it takes to execute them run this:
time ZSH_DEBUGRC=1 zsh -i -c exit
Recommendation would be to put this in an alias to make everything more comfortable.
Running the command will print something like this:
This approach will reveal which commands are the most time-consuming to load, setting you on the path to efficient customization. Happy profiling!