What I got wrong about fast terminals

nice follow up, a nice reminder of the power of community and the exchange of ideas

dank je wel

Wait what, recognizing errors and correcting them? Crazy!

But seriously this is great - I had dismissed the first post because I generally hate the various new shells: ash screws up basic history for me (as in “my subjective opinion based on my usage”), things like fish go overboard with ui that I don’t care about and couldn’t work out how to stop.

That said because I do have this, the one that looks like an automatic prompt cache seems great because I did make my own monstrosity prompt and did bad caching myself :)

I love posts like these. More people should do them; makes the internet a little more human.

Thank you! After your first post, I already optimized my zshrc, and cut the times in half. I did use zsh-bench after further researching the topic, but your article was the catalyst for it.

While it is not maintained anymore, zsh4humans is the state of the art regarding performance. Its author is some kind of Zsh genius. I don't use it myself because I prefer to stay in control, but I have stolen some of the ideas (the transient prompt) when it was possible for me to understand them.

I didn't notice that zsh-bench is from the same author.

This post is making learn about zsh-patina.

Having been a user of zsh-fast-syntax-highlighting for years, I'll have to evaluate this new kid on the block.

In a post about input latency, I source zsh-syntax-highlighting. That's a little embarrassing in hindsight, because it re-highlights the entire buffer on every keystroke, and on a long command line that's exactly the per-keystroke lag I warned about two sections later.

Does that cause notable lag? I've used code editors which essentially did that without noticeable lag. For a command line, where even a "long" command line tends to be fairly short by editor standards, I'm surprised if it caused issues. Unless perhaps syntax highlighting is more involved than I'm thinking.

Learned lots of new tricks from this! I've done really simple fixes, like making sure none of the data in the prompt is pulled from a slow backend. This has some much more fine grained optimizations. Thank you for producing this series! It's one of those small improvements to daily workflow that has an enormous impact after its summed up across god knows how many times I bring up a terminal.