XS VS prezto

Both provide scripting languages that are more "functional" (in the sense of functional programming). nushell is newer, written in Rust, under active development, and seems to be stabilizing. es is older (circa 1990s), written in C, and based on rc and scheme. There's also a C++ version xs that appears abandoned as well as a few forks sprinkled around. None are POSIX-compatible.

I'd rather have a more powerful shell that uses a functional style yet preserves many shell semantics we're all familiar with (like XS, https://github.com/TieDyedDevil/XS , except maintained!) than an easier-to-use shell

Beyond zprof (https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/zsh-profiling) not really I'm afraid. I did the majority of my zsh-prompt hacking 10 years ago and haven't thought about it since. That snippet could be from anywhere.

You could peek at something like zprezto https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto or pure https://github.com/sindresorhus/pure for tips.

Fetching git/hg/... info is always slow, so try and speed that up where you can (as to how to do that, uhh... I know my prompt has a dirty-state check nicked from pure for speed reasons). You can also cache any `asdf init zsh` or similar to a file and do the same "run in background" trick so the next shell will have any changes.

The biggest improvement I can remember was dropping zprezto for my own much smaller config, I really did not need much comparatively. Mostly some git info and "good default" options. I use zgenom for a plugin manager but only have 3 plugins, probably I should just dump it and inline the plugins to avoid getting owned one day.

Is the command line really so scary? I enjoy using it from time-to-time (usually not for gaming related reasons) and I like things like Prezto to make it look pretty.

I switched from Oh My Zsh to Prezto years ago. OMZ at the time was excruciatingly slow, but that may have changed. Maybe I should take another look at it, but Prezto has been great.

I installed iTerm2 and zsh shell with Prezto and I love my command line on OSX I use homebrew to install any tools that are missing and use pyenv to manage my python version (which I also do on Linux) that and the clang/gcc from the OSX command line tools and I pretty much have a full Un*x shell for anything I need to do

Moreover, there are tools were made on top of those to provide more functionalities, and fill some of the gaps, for instance, oh-my-zsh, Prezto, oh-my-fish, and much more. However, the default embedded terminal in macOS is still lacking something. That's why iTerm and other terminal like Hyper. It provides you a set of customization to boost your productivity.

See terminal below. On the left side is my prompt, and on the right side is information I presume came from the git module in prezto.

I recently heard about prezto which is a fork of ohmyzsh but haven't tried it yet (most of the plugins I use are in ohmyzsh) it is more customizable and less bloated than ohmyzsh.

If you want to try a different preconfigured shell environment, big names are Prezto and zsh4humans. Prezto, like OMZ, comes with a plugin manager built in; zsh4humans does not.