What I got wrong about fast terminals

A couple of days ago I published Life is too short for a slow terminal. It got quite a bit of traffic, and someone sent me the kind of feedback you actually hope for. The gist of it: A stripped-down config isn't the only way to a fast shell anymore. I simply didn't know about a lot of this stuff, I just worked with what I knew. Luckily, the Zsh community has a lot of smart people. So here's where the post falls short, point by point, because a correction is more useful than a defense. I measured the wrong thing This is the one that stings, because measurement was half the post. I led with this: $ for i in {1..5}; do /usr/bin/time zsh -i -c exit; done time zsh -i -c exit starts an interactive shell and immediately tears it down. It's the benchmark everyone reaches for, and zsh-bench has a whole section on why it's the wrong one. It measures total init time plus teardown, but total init time isn't what you wait on. What you wait on is the prompt showing up, the first command running,…