Powerlevel10k

Powerlevel10k is a theme for ZSH. It's a backward-compatible fork of Powerlevel9k with lower latency and better prompt responsiveness.

If you like the look and feel of Powerlevel9k but feeling frustrated by the slow prompt, simply replace your powerlevel9k theme with powerlevel10k and enjoy responsive shell like it's 80's again!

Powerlevel10k uses the same configuration options as Powerlevel9k and produces the same results. It's simply faster. There is no catch.

If you are on Linux or WSL, consider enabling gitstatus plugin for massive performance improvement in vcs/prompt segment. It works well with Powerlevel10k.

Installation & Configuration

For installation and configuration instructions, see Powerlevel9k. Everything in there applies to Powerlevel10k as well. Follow the installation guide, make sure everything works and you like the way prompt looks. Then simply replace powerlevel9k.zsh-theme with the one from Powerlevel10k (link). Or replace the whole powerlevel9k directory to gain the ability to git pull updates in the future. Once you restart zsh, your prompt will be faster.

Do not load both Powerlevel9k and Powerlevel10k themes at the same time. Variable name clashes will cause mayhem. Source either one or the other. Consider Powerlevel10k a patched fork of Powerlevel9k, which it is.

How fast is it?

Powerlevel10k with gitstatus renders prompt 5+ times faster than Powerlevel9k. In some cases it can be over 10 times faster. When using Linux, you should expect less than 50ms prompt latency in most cases, about 100ms in large git repos and 200ms in huge repos such as Linux kernel. To get comfortable upper bound on latency in any repo, set GITSTATUS_DIRTY_MAX_INDEX_SIZE=4096. It'll disable dirty file scanning in repos with over 4k files. This should give you under 100ms prompt latency everywhere.

What's the catch?

Really, there is no catch. It's the same prompt with the same flexibility and literally the same configuration as Powerlevel9k but much faster.