Well a bunch of things happened this week but I think the general theme is to optimize everything. It’s just something that I do from time to time cause gaining efficiency pleases my soul (like the cost efficiency from switching hosting provider).
Speeding up my zsh shell launch
I was feeling like my shell (zsh) launches have been getting slower and slower over time with additional plugins and packages to make my life better. But my workflow revolves a lot around the shell, so the waiting was starting to bother me.
TLDR; I managed to reduce the loading times from 1.xx seconds to 0.2x seconds.
The improvement was constant across various devices, some actually took more than 2 seconds cause of all the helper plugins I was using. But on average it was 5 times faster.
You can use this command to benchmark your shell speed.
for i in $(seq 1 10); do /usr/bin/time zsh -i -c exit; done
There was definitely a noticeable speed up when I open up a new tab. And it made my 5 year old laptop feel way faster than before.
What did I do?