Ditch omz and use Prezto with the Powerlevel10k prompt (just change the theme in the zpreztorc file to 'powerlevel10k' and restart your terminal), follow the initial prompts for setup, with "instant prompt" enabled and you'll never go back.

Thank you for this, I had somehow stumbled across powerlevel10k years ago on my "fooling around" laptop and liked it but couldn't remember how I'd gotten there. Long time zsh user here, just last week started playing with oh-my-zsh to integrate into my main system's shell environment.

this is probably the git plugin doing a "git status" or similar. Check the "plugins" array in .zshrc

Hence, my issue with the "infinitely configurable" idea: once you add plugins to the mix, it feels like responsibility for the end user experience falls on no one, so the users end up shouldering that, and, worse, sometimes develop a Stockholm Syndrome for it.

For example, to me, it is _insane_ that in 2021 async prompts are not a completely solved problem. The shell should provide a mechanism to do so easily, rather than duct-taping thin veneers over syscalls via a scripting language.

But we have the same in the fish world (my prompt shows me which branch i’m on if my working dir is a git repo) and it’s not slow.

You don't need that much plugins at all. The only plugin that I use is gitstatus, and zsh-syntax-highlight, and both of them are avoidable without loosing features.

And that delay when it updates itself is just the worst

This is the framework, not the plugins.

I thought there was something in, like, Powerman10k or something, which managed to avoid that issue?

You probably mean powerlevel10k[0], although that's mostly a replacement of powerlevel9k, which is only one of the (theming) plugins that oh-my-zsh commonly handles.

As for a replacement for oh-my-zsh itself, I had good experiences with zgen[1] but the fastest I've found is zim-fw[2] which produces acceptable start times for me[3].

[0] https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k/

[1] https://github.com/tarjoilija/zgen

[2] https://github.com/zimfw/zimfw/

[3] https://i.imgur.com/mPPQuyh.png

I use starship and it’s been pretty great and very fast.

It sounds like oh-my-zsh issue, not Zsh.