This is interesting as I had the exact opposite experience. Fish is screaming fast for me compared to zsh, primarily because I don’t need to use any plugins to

This is interesting as I had the exact opposite experience. Fish is screaming fast for me compared to zsh, primarily because I don’t need to use any plugins to achieve all of the functionality that I needed to use many plugins to achieve in zsh. The totality of my fish config files, not including functions, is maybe a couple dozen lines [1]. Regarding a bare shell: perhaps I’m not understanding your exact needs, but fish is able to check whether or not it’s being used interactively with `status is-interactive`, so you could certainly try wrapping all of the plug-in loading machinery around a guard like this. [1]: https://git.sr.ht/~gpanders/dotfiles/tree/master/item/.config/fish https://git.sr.ht/~gpanders/dotfiles/tree/master/item/.confi...