Oh My Zsh

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Power users weigh the benefits of Oh My Zsh and heavily customized zsh setups against minimalist configurations and alternative shells like fish. Many praise Oh My Zsh for its easy, feature-rich onboarding, but others criticize its startup performance and prefer either vanilla zsh with a few hand-picked plugins or fish for its fast, sensible defaults and strong autocompletion. The broader theme is how far to go in shell customization: whether to embrace large frameworks, build lean personal configs, or switch shells entirely to balance productivity, speed, and portability.

Role of Oh My Zsh (OMZ)

  • Seen as “dotfiles on easy mode”: quick to install, rich defaults, big plugin/theme collection, auto-update.
  • Many say it’s great for avoiding the configuration rabbit hole and being productive quickly, especially on new machines.
  • Others argue OMZ adds little beyond what vanilla zsh already has (autoload, promptinit, vcs_info) and introduces its own conventions to learn.
  • Several users ultimately remove OMZ after learning which pieces they actually need.

Performance and Startup Time

  • Repeated theme: heavy zsh/OMZ setups can feel slow, especially shell startup and opening new terminals.
  • Some report big wins moving to:
    • vanilla zsh + a few plugins
    • zsh + lighter plugin managers (zimfw, antidote, sheldon, zprezto)
    • minimalist prompts like starship or simple custom PS1.
  • Benchmarks and profiling often blame language managers (nvm, pyenv, conda, jabba) more than OMZ itself; lazy-loading or replacing them speeds things up.
  • Others say they never notice slowness, especially when using tmux or on fast hardware.

Fish Shell vs zsh/OMZ

  • Fish praised for: excellent defaults, syntax highlighting, powerful completions, simple functions/variables, minimal configuration, and speed.
  • Popular pattern: use fish interactively, but keep bash/zsh for scripting and portability.
  • Main complaint: fish is not bash-compatible; some scripts or copy-pasted commands need explicit bash or a compatibility layer.
  • Some users tried fish and quickly reverted to zsh due to muscle memory, tooling, or missing features.

Prompts, Plugins, and Ecosystem

  • Powerlevel10k, starship, tide (fish), oh-my-fish, oh-my-posh, and others are widely discussed.
  • Starship is valued for being cross-shell and reducing “prompt bikeshedding.”
  • Many replicate OMZ functionality with a handful of targeted plugins (syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, fzf integration, git helpers).

Shell Usage Philosophy

  • Split between:
    • Minimalists using near-vanilla bash/zsh with a few aliases.
    • Power users who heavily customize prompts, history, and workflows.
  • Command line is highlighted for bulk file operations, text manipulation, automation, reproducible workflows, and better documentation via commands instead of GUIs.