My new .zshrc configuration

As minimal as possible

I am ashamed of the amount of hours I have spent in the past configuring my terminal.

These hours are not completely wasted, of course, I certainly learned a few things about the shell. In hindsight, however, I think those hours could have been spent on more productive things.

Over the years, spending thousands of hours on the command line, I’ve learned that it is more important to keep things minimal, portable and easy to set up. My current CLI setup is extremely clean and minimal, can be used on any system, uses no plugins, and therefore does not need bloated plugin managers like oh my zsh.

This is just my take on it. If you enjoy ricing your shell and tinkering with your prompt as a creative activity, by all means, go for it. I’m not saying that it is a useless activity. But when coaching members in my private community, I always warn them of these rabbit holes, and some of my students have made very impressive progress in staying focused on their goals and not being sucked into suboptimal rabbit holes after I nudge them in the right direction.

In this week’s video, I walk you through my entire .zshrc that I created when switching back to zsh from bash. It also contains information about my new YubiKey based OpSec setup which I plan to create content about in the near future.

What about you? Do you spend too much time messing with your configuration files? Or do you enjoy it as a creative hobby?

Wishing you a great week. May you all be happy, healthy and well.

Yours,

Mischa