Moving away from Oh My Zsh (OMZ)

I’ve been running Oh My Zsh (OMZ) on every workstation I’ve ever owned. It was one of the first things I’d install when setting up a new machine or cleanly updating an existing one. For years, I’ve blindly copied my workstation configuration from one Macbook to the next, without questioning whether I still needed something in the current day and age, or whether it had quietly been replaced by something better.

The first time I wrote about my setup was in 2023 and since then I’ve written about it every year: 2024 and 2025 and recently in 2026. The last post is a result of me taking my time and making conscious decisions. Somewhere in that process, I realized that my setup and especially my terminal setup, was bloated.

That realization has been growing strong over a period of last few months. I didn’t have the time to act on. But a few weeks back, I reconfigured my Starship prompt and wrote about it. During the process, I opened up .zshrc to do some cleanup and that is when I noticed I had quietly stopped using Oh My Zsh a while ago, and don’t need it anymore.

Started in 2009 by Robby Russell as a personal config, OMZ solves a real problem when Robby was asked by his coworkers on setting up zsh on their machines. Rather than walking them through the same commands every time, he packaged his dotfiles into a single install.

That is the exact problem OMZ has solved for me. Especially, the plugins were my favorite feature even though I’ve narrowed it down to only four plugins:

plugins=(
    git
    node
    vscode
    direnv
)

ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell" was commented out. Had been for over a year, since Starship started running my prompt. Auto-updates were disabled. zsh-syntax-highlighting was being sourced manually, with its full path written by hand, sitting outside the plugin system entirely

However, now when I am writing it, I am realizing it I never took its advantage to full. Primarily, because adding more plugins would slow down the shell startup. I use iTerm2 and recently started using Ghostty as well, and the shell startup was noticeably slow in both. I haven’t done the profiling with zprof but a friend of mine, Scott Spence has written about it here Speeding Up My ZSH Shell. Go read it if you are interested about the details and you might end up listening to the tips Scott has to share.

After replacing Oh My Zsh framework, here’s how my .zshrc file looks like. It has more alias that I use daily and less configuration:

export PATH=/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH

# Required for Expo and React Native local app development
export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/zulu-17.jdk/Contents/Home

# Android specific paths after installing Android Studio
export ANDROID_HOME="$HOME/Library/Android/sdk"
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/emulator
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools

# To stop brew from auto updating
export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1

## Compilation flags
export ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64"

## Enable AUTO_CD to automatically change to a directory when you `cd` into it
setopt AUTO_CD

## Opening various directory
alias g="cd $HOME/github/"
alias n="cd $HOME/github/notes/"

## Show touch on iOS simulator
alias showtouch="defaults write com.apple.iphonesimulator ShowSingleTouches 1"

## Hide touch on iOS simulator
alias hidetouch="defaults write com.apple.iphonesimulator ShowSingleTouches 0"

## Show/Hide hidden files in Finder
alias show="defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true && killall Finder"
alias hide="defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool false && killall Finder"
alias killds="find . -type f -name '*.DS_Store' -ls -delete"
alias kdock="killall Dock"

## git shorthands
alias gall="git add ."
alias ga="git add"
alias gc="git commit -m"
alias gs="git status"
alias gpush="git push -u origin"
alias glog="git log --oneline --graph --decorate --color"
alias gap="git add -p"
alias gck="git checkout"
alias gb="git branch"
alias gslog="git shortlog -s"

eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

# Starship
eval "$(starship init zsh)"

# mise
eval "$(mise activate zsh)"

# Enable syntax highlighting
source $(brew --prefix)/share/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh

OMZ solved a real problem for me for a long time. It collected the good parts and gave me a single install command. For its time, it was a genuinely useful piece of software, and it deserves credit for the role it played in making zsh approachable when I had no idea what I was doing.