Noticeable delay on macOS

[alienxp03]

Switching to powerlevel9k made my prompt to be noticeably slower than before. Is there any reason why?

ys theme

powerlevel9k theme

[dritter]

Hi @alienxp03 !
Thanks for the report. Yes, performance is a long pain point in P9K..
I'll try to explain the different types of bottlenecks and show what we are currently working on.

• Obvious things first: P9K has grown a lot in the last years. So there is a lot of code to execute.
• Some parts of that code is pretty IO intensive. So a fast SSD would help.
• Use of slow wrappers. Currently we execute the plain commands, without bypassing any aliases or wrappers. This may be a cause for lagginess, but is already addressed at some points (Fix wrapper slowness in vcs segment #797).
• Maximum flexibility: We lately had a discussion about that (Discussion: Speed vs Flexibility #817) and started optimising for speed (Rewrite - Test branch in progress #833)
• Avoid large git repos. At least keep them clean. A lot of untracked files will slow down the Prompt (vcs prompt element causing extreme slowness/hanging  #323 (comment))
• Use a recent version of git (especially on Mac; the shipped version of git is ancient)
• Use GNU/Coreutils on Mac instead of the shipped ones (and include them as aliases in your PATH first)
• Make use of ZSHs async capabilities. We tried that in the past (Async all the segments #344) and are working on getting ZSH-Async integrated.

I hope this gives some insights about this topic and shows that we are trying to fix the performance issues.

[cameroncooke]

Mines twice as slow as the one in the preview above and I'm using minimal options and plugins. Was using Agnoster theme and it had the same Git capabilities and was much faster.

[bhilburn]

@alienxp03 @cameroncooke - The move to v0.7.0, especially once asynchronous segments are enabled, should go a long way, here.

We have a decent discussion going about exactly this topic over in #732, and I'm going to close this issue to keep the conversation focused in that issue. If you're up for trying out next and letting us know how it works for you over in #732, that would be great!