Like any other hacker, I’ve been procrastinating making progress on my main project by tinkering with my shell and prompt. The idea was to nuke everything and start afresh. I was running Zsh as my shell, Prezto as the configuration manager and the Spaceship prompt. Over time, I had focused on making the shell look pretty rather than be really fast/performant, and also I hadn’t made any big changes in a year or so, so I wanted to look around the reconfigure it from scratch.

I’m still sticking with zsh as my shell. I have no problems with it (I’m not writing any mission critical shell scripts that might be executed in a different shell), and the community still seems very active and vibrant. I was also not explicitly aware that Macs ship with zsh as the default shell now.

Instead of using any sort of configuration/plugin manager for zsh, I’m moving to managing things myself. For the prompt, I’m experimenting with Starship prompt (rust-powered, which is interesting). Installing it is a breeze with homebrew and loading it within zshrc. I haven’t tweaked around with its default configuration much, but I did install (FireCode Nerd Font)[https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads] to make the prompt look good.

For the zsh plugins, I’m sticking to only 3 to start out with: zsh-autosuggestions (installed with homebrew), zsh-syntax-highlighting (installed with homebrew) and zsh-nvm (copied from Github, to avoid nvm loading performance penalty). Apart from these 3 plugins, I’m just using a few lines to get coloured output working with the shell and getting history lookups working fine.

I’ll stick with this configuration for a few days and report back.

My entire .zshrc looks like this right now:

# Zsh improvements
export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=ExGxBxDxCxEgEdxbxgxcxd
autoload -U up-line-or-beginning-search
autoload -U down-line-or-beginning-search
zle -N up-line-or-beginning-search
zle -N down-line-or-beginning-search
bindkey "^[[A" up-line-or-beginning-search # Up
bindkey "^[[B" down-line-or-beginning-search # Down

# Make sure Homebrew (including installed packages) are on the path
export PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH"

# Load up PyEnv
export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"
[[ -d $PYENV_ROOT/bin ]] && export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"
eval "$(pyenv init - zsh)"

# Load up Node Version Manager
export NVM_LAZY_LOAD=true
source ~/.zsh-nvm/zsh-nvm.plugin.zsh

# Start starship rust prompt (supposed to be *fast*)
eval "$(starship init zsh)"

# Zsh plugins
source /opt/homebrew/share/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh
source $(brew --prefix)/share/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zsh