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 looks of Powerlevel9k but feeling frustrated by its 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, enable gitstatus plugin for additional performance improvement in the vcs/prompt segment.

Table of Contents

1. Installation and configuration
2. Try it in Docker
3. How fast is it?
4. What's the catch?

Installation and configuration

For installation and configuration instructions see Powerlevel9k. Everything in there applies to Powerlevel10k as well. Follow the official installation guide, make sure everything works and you like the way prompt looks. Then simply replace Powerlevel9k with Powerlevel10k. Once you restart zsh, your prompt will be faster. No configuration changes are needed.

Manual installation:

git clone https://github.com/romkatv/gitstatus.git ~/gitstatus
git clone https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k.git ~/powerlevel10k
echo 'source ~/gitstatus/gitstatus.plugin.zsh' >>! ~/.zshrc
echo 'source ~/powerlevel10k/powerlevel10k.zsh-theme' >>! ~/.zshrc

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

Try it in Docker

Try Powerlevel10k in Docker without making any changes to your system.

docker run -e LANG=C.UTF-8 -e LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 -e TERM=$TERM -it --rm ubuntu bash -c '
  set -uex
  apt update
  apt install -y zsh git
  cd
  git clone https://github.com/romkatv/gitstatus.git
  git clone https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k.git
  echo "
    # Your prompt configuration goes here.
    POWERLEVEL9K_PROMPT_ON_NEWLINE=true
    POWERLEVEL9K_LEFT_PROMPT_ELEMENTS=(root_indicator dir_writable dir vcs)
    POWERLEVEL9K_RIGHT_PROMPT_ELEMENTS=(status command_execution_time background_jobs time)
    source ~/gitstatus/gitstatus.plugin.zsh
    source ~/powerlevel10k/powerlevel10k.zsh-theme" >~/.zshrc
  cd powerlevel10k
  zsh -i'

Compare prompt responsiveness to Powerlevel9k.

docker run -e LANG=C.UTF-8 -e LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 -e TERM=$TERM -it --rm ubuntu bash -c '
  set -uex
  apt update
  apt install -y zsh git
  cd
  git clone https://github.com/bhilburn/powerlevel9k.git
  echo "
    # Your prompt configuration goes here.
    POWERLEVEL9K_PROMPT_ON_NEWLINE=true
    POWERLEVEL9K_LEFT_PROMPT_ELEMENTS=(root_indicator dir_writable dir vcs)
    POWERLEVEL9K_RIGHT_PROMPT_ELEMENTS=(status command_execution_time background_jobs time)
    source ~/powerlevel9k/powerlevel9k.zsh-theme" >~/.zshrc
  cd powerlevel9k
  zsh -i'

How fast is it?

Powerlevel10k with gitstatus renders prompt about 10 times faster than powerlevel9k/master (stable version) and about 5 times faster than powerlevel9k/next (beta version). Powerlevel10k is faster than Powerlevel9k even without gitstatus but the difference isn't as dramatic.

Here are benchmark results obtained with zsh-prompt-benchmark on Intel i9-7900X running Ubuntu 18.04.

Theme	/	~/testrepo	~/nerd-fonts	~/linux
powerlevel9k/master	135 ms	207 ms	234 ms	326 ms
powerlevel9k/next	47 ms	101 ms	122 ms	213 ms
powerlevel10k	24 ms	82 ms	104 ms	197 ms
powerlevel10k with gitstatus	9 ms	11 ms	27 ms	71 ms
naked zsh	1 ms	1 ms	1 ms	1 ms

Columns define the current directory where the prompt was rendered.

• / -- root directory, not a git repo.
• ~/testrepo -- a tiny git repo.
• ~/nerd-fonts -- nerd-fonts git repo with 4k files.
• ~/linux -- linux git repo. Huge.

Here's how the prompt looked like (identical by design in Powerlevel9k and Powerlevel 10k):

Configuration that was used during benchmarking:

POWERLEVEL9K_LEFT_PROMPT_ELEMENTS=(dir_writable dir vcs)
POWERLEVEL9K_RIGHT_PROMPT_ELEMENTS=(status background_jobs time custom_rprompt)

POWERLEVEL9K_MODE=nerdfont-complete
POWERLEVEL9K_PROMPT_ON_NEWLINE=true
POWERLEVEL9K_CUSTOM_RPROMPT=custom_rprompt
POWERLEVEL9K_ROOT_ICON=\\uF09CPOWERLEVEL9K_TIME_ICON=\\uF017
POWERLEVEL9K_CUSTOM_RPROMPT_ICON=\\uF005
POWERLEVEL9K_TIME_BACKGROUND=magenta
POWERLEVEL9K_CUSTOM_RPROMPT_BACKGROUND=blue
POWERLEVEL9K_STATUS_OK_BACKGROUND=grey53
POWERLEVEL9K_BACKGROUND_JOBS_BACKGROUND=orange1
POWERLEVEL9K_BACKGROUND_JOBS_FOREGROUND=black

# Powerlevel10k extension to enable gitstatus. Has no effect on Powerlevel9k.
POWERLEVEL9K_VCS_STATUS_COMMAND=gitstatus_query_dir

function custom_rprompt() echo -E "hello world"

Here's the same benchmark for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with zsh running in the standard Command Prompt (cmd.exe).

Theme	/	~/testrepo	~/nerd-fonts	~/linux
powerlevel9k/master	313 ms	531 ms	693 ms	5898 ms
powerlevel9k/next	119 ms	278 ms	442 ms	5710 ms
powerlevel10k	66 ms	237 ms	399 ms	5569 ms
powerlevel10k with gitstatus	22 ms	30 ms	30 ms	5098 ms
naked zsh	16 ms	16 ms	16 ms	16 ms

Here Powerlevel10k with gitstatus has even bigger advantage over Powerlevel9k and manages to render prompt with low latency.

However, every theme failed miserably on the humongous Linux kernel repo, showing prompt latency over 5 seconds. This might be related to some sort of system cache that can fit indices of smaller repos but not of Linux kernel. To work around this problem, you can instruct gitstatus to not scan dirty files on repos with over 4k files in the index (see GITSTATUS_DIRTY_MAX_INDEX_SIZE in gitstatus docs). Linux kernel is the only repo in these benchmarks that is over this threshold. Its prompt latency goes down to 32 ms but the prompt no longer shows whether there are dirty (unstaged or untracked) files. It does helpfully indicate with the color that there might be such files.

What's the catch?

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