6.1 KiB
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, consider enabling gitstatus plugin for additional performance improvement in the vcs/prompt segment.
Installation & 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 the content of your powerlevel9k
directory with Powerlevel10k. Once you restart zsh, your prompt will be faster. No
configuration changes are needed.
If you are using oh-my-zsh, here's how you can replace Powerlevel9k with Powerlevel10k.
# Delete the original powerlevel9k theme.
rm -rf ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/themes/powerlevel9k
# Put powerlevel10k in its place.
git clone git@github.com:romkatv/powerlevel10k.git ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/themes/powerlevel9k
Adjust these commands based on where your powerlevel9k directory is.
Alternatively, you can place Powerlevel10k in powerlevel10k directory and modify
the theme name in your .zshrc. However, 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.
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.