I’ve been using hand-crafted .zshrc for few years with very little change. Now it appeared to slow down zsh startup on msys. I pinpointed out the cause: which searches had to traverse tons of directories in the PATH. Then I decided to rework the whole configuration, there should have been something similar to vim-plug for ZSH.

Starting from Arch wiki page, I run into antigen, then antibody. But continued searching until on the page awesome-zsh-plugins I found the exhaustive list of available zsh frameworks. My choice is now zplug: fast, pleasant and seem to be popular enough.

So what I did now:

  • Started .zshrc from scratch.
  • Chose prompt Pure, which checks git status asynchronously (!).
  • Restored what I needed for productivity: shortcuts, functions, zsh settings etc.
  • Changed searching with which to checking for programs in well-known places.

Now the config will be easier to maintain, keep up to date and extend, hopefully. And yes, it does load much faster!

Zplug