Instead of Oh My Zsh: Starship
If you installed Oh My Zsh mainly for its prompt themes, replace it with Starship. Starship is a single binary that draws the prompt, shows Git, language and cloud context, and works the same in Zsh, Bash, fish and PowerShell. For Oh My Zsh's other plugins, load just the few you use.
Both are for getting an informative, good-looking shell prompt.
Why Starship is better
- The same prompt config works in Zsh, Bash, fish, PowerShell and others, on any operating system.
- It is a compiled Rust binary, so the prompt does not depend on a large framework of shell scripts loading at startup.
- Every part of the prompt is customisable, from minimal to feature-rich, and it shows Git status, language versions and other tool context.
- Setup takes minutes, with one binary and one init line in your shell config.
When to keep Oh My Zsh
Keep Oh My Zsh if you use many of its 300+ plugins and like its aliases and completions in one package, or if you value its auto-update tool and community of 2,500+ contributors more than shell startup time.
Switching
Install Starship, add eval "$(starship init zsh)" to the end of ~/.zshrc, and remove the ZSH_THEME line. Starship replaces only the prompt; Oh My Zsh's plugins, aliases and completions are separate. Many people keep Oh My Zsh for plugins at first, then replace those with a few individually loaded plugins.
Watch out
Starship's icons need a patched font installed in your terminal. Starship leaves autosuggestions, syntax highlighting and completion setup to you, so moving off Oh My Zsh entirely takes extra work. Powerlevel10k, the other popular prompt for Zsh, now states that it has very limited support.
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Judged on 2026-11-06. See every shells and shell prompts, or all 66 replacements.