June 8, 2026
Clicks vs clacks: nerd war erupts
Life is too short for a slow terminal
Computer fans are fighting over why clicking feels painfully slow
TLDR: The writer says a fast command window matters because tiny delays pile up all day, and shows how cutting extras made it open almost instantly. Commenters turned that into a bigger fight over keyboards versus clicking, with some preaching terminal supremacy and others saying people should just use what suits them.
A developer’s big flex on shell speed — getting a fully loaded command window to open in about 30 milliseconds — somehow turned into a full-on culture war over whether anyone should even care. The original post argues that tiny delays add up when you live in a terminal all day, and the fix is simple: cut the bloat, stop loading extra stuff you barely use, and keep your setup lean. Translation for non-terminal people: if your work window feels sluggish every time it opens, that irritation stacks up fast.
But the real fireworks were in the comments, where people basically split into Team “the keyboard is freedom” and Team “calm down, use whatever works.” One reader shrugged that it all comes down to what you learned first, saying there’s no right or wrong. Others were way less diplomatic. One person practically declared the mouse a historical mistake, arguing that clicking through visual menus breaks muscle memory and slows everything down. Another dropped the bluntest mic of all: “gui? what gui?” That energy set the tone.
The funniest part is how a post about shaving milliseconds off a work tool became a referendum on modern computing itself. Keyboard loyalists praised text-based tools as faster, more flexible, and easier to combine, while the less dramatic crowd tried to remind everyone that different jobs need different tools. In other words: one person optimized a work habit, and the internet responded like it was a battle for civilization.
Key Points
- •The article reports an interactive `zsh` startup time of about 30 milliseconds for a shell configured with completions, syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, `fzf`, and `direnv`.
- •It recommends avoiding shell frameworks and plugin managers such as `oh-my-zsh` and `prezto`, and instead directly sourcing only the needed plugins.
- •It identifies `compinit` as a major source of startup cost and suggests caching completion initialization with `.zcompdump`, using `compinit -C` when the cache is fresh.
- •It shows how to lazy-load `nvm` by wrapping it in a function that loads the real script only on first use.
- •It applies the same lazy-loading pattern to `kubectl` completions and notes that tools initialized via `eval "$(tool init zsh)"` are often candidates for deferred loading.