https://bharathravichandran.com/blog/tags/terminal/Recent content in Terminal on Bharath Kumar RavichandranHugoen-USBharath Kumar RavichandranThu, 17 Sep 2026 23:46:19 -0700https://bharathravichandran.com/blog/posts/down-the-dotfiles-rabbit-hole/Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:46:19 -0700https://bharathravichandran.com/blog/posts/down-the-dotfiles-rabbit-hole/<p>I started looking at my dotfiles again because a new <code>Zsh</code> shell took 1.508 seconds to load. I open new shells often enough that the delay was noticeable.</p> <p>I used Claude Code with Opus 5 and Sonnet 5, and Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol to profile the startup time and refactor most of the repository. I did my part by drinking coffee and opening too many terminal tabs xD.</p> <h2 id="what-was-slowing-down-zsh">What was slowing down Zsh</h2> <p><code>Zsh</code> completion uses <code>compinit</code> to scan the functions in <code>$fpath</code> and build a completion dump. A full scan is useful when completions have changed, but it does not need to happen every time a shell starts.</p>