Intro

Although not as ubiquitous as bash, zsh has many advantages over it. While fish is an even better shell than zsh, it does not offer the same level of run any script ™ advantage like zsh.

Plugins Managers

To get the features offered by fish and more, people have created many plugins to make life easier. But who manages all these plugins ? Ofcourse the plugin managers. People new to ZSH are commonly introduced to oh-my-zsh, an excellent software, easy to use, and integrates easily with most plugins. But after some time, as the number of plugins increase, the shell startup time increases. This is the major pain point of using this framework. Many plugin managers were created to alleviate this pain point. One of which I used is zinit. Although it is a great plugin manager, it had a complex and very elaborate syntax. Though I stuck to it for some time, I recently found out zsh-snap

Enter zsh-snap

Znap (short for zsh-snap) provides you all the advantages of zinit minus the complexity. Here is a snippet of my zsh configuration

source ~/.znap/zsh-snap/znap.zsh

# Prompt
znap eval starship 'starship init zsh --print-full-init'
znap prompt

# Completion functions
fpath+=( ~[ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh]/plugins/{docker,fd,ripgrep} )
znap compdef _rustup 'rustup completions zsh'
znap compdef _cargo  'rustup completions zsh cargo'

# Plugins
znap source zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
znap source zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting
znap source wfxr/forgit

znap source sorin-ionescu/prezto modules/{environment,history}
znap source ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh 'lib/(*~(git|theme-and-appearance).zsh)' plugins/{git}

# Evals
znap eval zoxide "zoxide init zsh"

# -- snipped --

Recent plugin managers seem to embrace the idea of time to value (loading the prompt first) and let the user use a shell while loading the plugins asynchronously in the background. The same behavior can be seen in the config as well. We first load the prompt (I use starship), then install some completions, load a few plugins, run some inits, and done! Znap takes care of caching and will intelligently store data without running all commands on every run.

Znap also offers good compatibility with wide range of plugins (Just be careful of the order in which you load plugins). Love something in oh-my-zsh or prezto? You can use the libs/plugins just like any other plugins.

Plugins

Here is my "shell" tour: