5 ms·

Migrate From Oh-my-zsh to Prezto

75 points by jdalbert 12y ago

Tiksi 12y ago
While this looks interesting, the main premise that oh-my-zsh is slow doesn't seem to hold up for me. I have a decently quick system, but nothing extreme and I don't notice much more lag with auto completion than I did with bash or fish. And I use auto completion excessively, and I'm not sparse with my oh-my-zsh plugins: plugins=(git golang archlinux catimg common-aliases compleat dircycle dirhistory sudo systemd urltools) and also use other (non oh-my-zsh)"plugins" on top of that. Startup also isn't an issue and isn't any slower than it was before, and I'm using terminator which isn't exactly "light" by itself. That being said, it looks interesting and I plan on fiddling around with it a bit.
- ylhert 12y ago
  yea oh-my-zsh isn't that slow, most people who think it is slow either have it misconfigured or have a really, really slow system
  - deleted 12y ago
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  - jdalbert 12y ago
    I ran a little comparison with both Oh-my-zsh and Prezto with roughly the same plugins: http://i.imgur.com/cDSRZuO.png http://i.imgur.com/cDSRZuO.png. There's almost a 0.4s difference. In practice it makes for a noticeable 0.5-1s difference (with all the other stuff I have in my .zshrc).
  - porker 12y ago
    I tested opening a new iTerm 2 tab on my late-2009 MBP and it takes 3.5-4s for the prompt to appear with oh-my-zsh enabled. I would love to know what I've got misconfigured.
    - dehmlow 12y ago
      Definitely not a misconfiguration. I had the exact same issue after a certain period of time with every fresh install. The solution was switching to Prezto / fish (work / home respectively).
  - pygy_ 12y ago
    I have a fast system (Core i5, SSD), but tab completion is often very slow. I just checked my `oh-my-zsh/plugins` directory, and there are 173 plugins, most of which I don't need. Should I purge them? Edit: browsing through the (oh-my-)zsh files, I can see that it only loads the plugins found in the `plugin` environment variable, so I guess the answer is no. The only plugin enabled is `git`. My theme is also very basic (git and mercurial status). Any advice to improve performance?
  - cweiss 12y ago
    FWIW - There is a known issue with Apple's built-in-git and the Git oh-my-zsh plugin that really slows down prompt redraws. it has to do with the way the built in Git does repository polls, I believe. The solution is to install the latest Git client (preferably via Homebrew or whatever).
- deleted 12y ago
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- notduncansmith 12y ago
  I haven't measured it directly but I definitely noticed a speedup when I switched to zsh, probably in the 0.2s-0.4s range. I probably actually slimmed down a bit, I don't have any plugins and my .zshrc is mostly aliases and path management.
naiyt 12y ago
I'm still pretty fond of fish myself, mainly for the sane scripting. Wondering if it might be worth switching to zsh for the extra plugins and community support, though.
- nextos 12y ago
  I'd also be very interested in this question. As a zsh user, I'm always eyeing fish, which seems to be getting better all the time. I'm also interested in making bash tab completion behave a close as possible to zsh, just for those servers where installing zsh is a hassle. Never found a way. It's always slightly different, and thus very annoying.
ziodave 12y ago
Is it actively maintained? The article is from May 2014 and last commit in repo is 4 months ago.
- jdalbert 12y ago
  Looks active to me: the repo owner actively participates in bugs/PR opened days or hours ago. As for the article, I started it in May, forgot about it, then released it today. Hence the May 2014 date.
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sudhirj 12y ago
Why not just contribute the optimisations back to ohmyzsh? This was made to be a drop in replacement anyway.
- fbernier 12y ago
  If I remember correctly zprezto started as a huge pull request to oh-my-zsh that the author rejected. You can probably find it in the closed issues of oh-my-zsh.
  - shadytrees 12y ago
    Here it is. https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/issues/377 https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/issues/377 (tl;dr seven-month fork that fixed over 100 issues)
    - manicdee 12y ago
      TL;DR: Robby Russell wanted out-of-the-box functionality for newbies, and auto-updated turned on. Sorin Ionescu wanted better tailoring for experts and didn't want the auto-update which he saw as annoying. Thus the split between the code bases.
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buf 12y ago
Nice writeup, Jerome! While I personally do not suffer from a slow down on ohmyzsh, I will give prezto a shot because why not, using your guidance.
reedlaw 12y ago
I prefer grml's zsh config [1]. It's used on the Arch Linux installation image. Has lots of completions and git support out of the box. 1. https://grml.org/zsh/ https://grml.org/zsh/
Karunamon 12y ago
Something I noticed after migrating to oh-my-zsh while still on a spinning drive - if you're on a mac and clear out your system logfiles (rm /private/var/log/asl/*.asl), prompts begin to appear almost instantly even with ZSH. I have no idea what is happening to cause this, but the performance difference is unmistakable.
- Wonnk13 12y ago
  huh, can confirm prompts are appearing faster. what the hell is this?
  - pfranz 12y ago
    I forgot I did this about a year ago. I just did it again now and terminal launches instantly. I'm not sure when in the process it gets hung up, but these are Apple System Logs. Mine didn't look too bad; less than a hundred files taking less than 20mb or so. Here's an article where they got rather excessive (84GB): http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=641936 http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=641936 You can look at them if you want using: syslog -f <file.asl> | less I should time the init and print a suggestion to delete the files if it goes over a threshold.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- cweiss 12y ago
  FWIW - I'm pretty sure this is shell-independent. Happens with BASH as well.
saidajigumi 12y ago
To the larger issue of "my shell is slow", it's very helpful to profile it. I keep some standard startup profiling code[1] in my .zshrc that I enable when I need to profile things. In my experience, this virtually always identifies a very specific culprit for performance problems. [1] https://github.com/jwhitley/zshrc/blob/master/.zshrc#L18 https://github.com/jwhitley/zshrc/blob/master/.zshrc#L18 and https://github.com/jwhitley/zshrc/blob/master/.zshrc#L151 https://github.com/jwhitley/zshrc/blob/master/.zshrc#L151
- deleted 12y ago
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75 points by jdalbert 12y ago

Tiksi 12y ago

While this looks interesting, the main premise that oh-my-zsh is slow doesn't seem to hold up for me. I have a decently quick system, but nothing extreme and I don't notice much more lag with auto completion than I did with bash or fish. And I use auto completion excessively, and I'm not sparse with my oh-my-zsh plugins: plugins=(git golang archlinux catimg common-aliases compleat dircycle dirhistory sudo systemd urltools) and also use other (non oh-my-zsh)"plugins" on top of that. Startup also isn't an issue and isn't any slower than it was before, and I'm using terminator which isn't exactly "light" by itself. That being said, it looks interesting and I plan on fiddling around with it a bit.

ylhert 12y ago
yea oh-my-zsh isn't that slow, most people who think it is slow either have it misconfigured or have a really, really slow system
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jdalbert 12y ago
  I ran a little comparison with both Oh-my-zsh and Prezto with roughly the same plugins: http://i.imgur.com/cDSRZuO.png http://i.imgur.com/cDSRZuO.png. There's almost a 0.4s difference. In practice it makes for a noticeable 0.5-1s difference (with all the other stuff I have in my .zshrc).
- porker 12y ago
  I tested opening a new iTerm 2 tab on my late-2009 MBP and it takes 3.5-4s for the prompt to appear with oh-my-zsh enabled. I would love to know what I've got misconfigured.
  - dehmlow 12y ago
    Definitely not a misconfiguration. I had the exact same issue after a certain period of time with every fresh install. The solution was switching to Prezto / fish (work / home respectively).
- pygy_ 12y ago
  I have a fast system (Core i5, SSD), but tab completion is often very slow. I just checked my `oh-my-zsh/plugins` directory, and there are 173 plugins, most of which I don't need. Should I purge them? Edit: browsing through the (oh-my-)zsh files, I can see that it only loads the plugins found in the `plugin` environment variable, so I guess the answer is no. The only plugin enabled is `git`. My theme is also very basic (git and mercurial status). Any advice to improve performance?
- cweiss 12y ago
  FWIW - There is a known issue with Apple's built-in-git and the Git oh-my-zsh plugin that really slows down prompt redraws. it has to do with the way the built in Git does repository polls, I believe. The solution is to install the latest Git client (preferably via Homebrew or whatever).
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
notduncansmith 12y ago
I haven't measured it directly but I definitely noticed a speedup when I switched to zsh, probably in the 0.2s-0.4s range. I probably actually slimmed down a bit, I don't have any plugins and my .zshrc is mostly aliases and path management.

naiyt 12y ago

I'm still pretty fond of fish myself, mainly for the sane scripting. Wondering if it might be worth switching to zsh for the extra plugins and community support, though.

nextos 12y ago
I'd also be very interested in this question. As a zsh user, I'm always eyeing fish, which seems to be getting better all the time. I'm also interested in making bash tab completion behave a close as possible to zsh, just for those servers where installing zsh is a hassle. Never found a way. It's always slightly different, and thus very annoying.

ziodave 12y ago

Is it actively maintained? The article is from May 2014 and last commit in repo is 4 months ago.

jdalbert 12y ago
Looks active to me: the repo owner actively participates in bugs/PR opened days or hours ago. As for the article, I started it in May, forgot about it, then released it today. Hence the May 2014 date.

deleted 12y ago

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sudhirj 12y ago

Why not just contribute the optimisations back to ohmyzsh? This was made to be a drop in replacement anyway.

fbernier 12y ago
If I remember correctly zprezto started as a huge pull request to oh-my-zsh that the author rejected. You can probably find it in the closed issues of oh-my-zsh.
- shadytrees 12y ago
  Here it is. https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/issues/377 https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/issues/377 (tl;dr seven-month fork that fixed over 100 issues)
  - manicdee 12y ago
    TL;DR: Robby Russell wanted out-of-the-box functionality for newbies, and auto-updated turned on. Sorin Ionescu wanted better tailoring for experts and didn't want the auto-update which he saw as annoying. Thus the split between the code bases.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

buf 12y ago

Nice writeup, Jerome! While I personally do not suffer from a slow down on ohmyzsh, I will give prezto a shot because why not, using your guidance.

reedlaw 12y ago

I prefer grml's zsh config [1]. It's used on the Arch Linux installation image. Has lots of completions and git support out of the box. 1. https://grml.org/zsh/ https://grml.org/zsh/

Karunamon 12y ago

Something I noticed after migrating to oh-my-zsh while still on a spinning drive - if you're on a mac and clear out your system logfiles (rm /private/var/log/asl/*.asl), prompts begin to appear almost instantly even with ZSH. I have no idea what is happening to cause this, but the performance difference is unmistakable.

Wonnk13 12y ago
huh, can confirm prompts are appearing faster. what the hell is this?
- pfranz 12y ago
  I forgot I did this about a year ago. I just did it again now and terminal launches instantly. I'm not sure when in the process it gets hung up, but these are Apple System Logs. Mine didn't look too bad; less than a hundred files taking less than 20mb or so. Here's an article where they got rather excessive (84GB): http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=641936 http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=641936 You can look at them if you want using: syslog -f <file.asl> | less I should time the init and print a suggestion to delete the files if it goes over a threshold.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
cweiss 12y ago
FWIW - I'm pretty sure this is shell-independent. Happens with BASH as well.

saidajigumi 12y ago

To the larger issue of "my shell is slow", it's very helpful to profile it. I keep some standard startup profiling code[1] in my .zshrc that I enable when I need to profile things. In my experience, this virtually always identifies a very specific culprit for performance problems. [1] https://github.com/jwhitley/zshrc/blob/master/.zshrc#L18 https://github.com/jwhitley/zshrc/blob/master/.zshrc#L18 and https://github.com/jwhitley/zshrc/blob/master/.zshrc#L151 https://github.com/jwhitley/zshrc/blob/master/.zshrc#L151

deleted 12y ago
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