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sindresorhus
pure
Shell2013–2025
sindresorhus / pure

pure

Pretty, minimal and fast ZSH prompt

14Distinct people
15Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
14.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Pretty, minimal and fast ZSH prompt

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

My favorite for this purpose is pure prompt: https://github.com/sindresorhus/pure I wasn’t sure about multi line at first, but really digging it now.

noahtallen used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year15 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-02-08 15:11:56 UTC to 2025-07-20 23:48:43 UTC.

01232013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 2 submissions, 1 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC321
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

15 sources
There's so many plugin systems for zsh. From comments it seems like Pretzo is the main one suggested. But there's a huge list of different offerings. Looking at https://github.com/sindresorhus/pure?tab=readme-ov-file#inte... , there's also for example zim, zplug, zinit, zi. It's be so great to have see some deeper investigations or comparisons: is Pretzo really the best choice? Aside from seeming popularity, why? At least found this neat gist with a cheat sheet for different zsh plugin systems (and how very many there are!) https://gist.github.com/olets/06009589d7887617e061481e22cf5a...
In Speeding up my ZSH shell
Beyond zprof (https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/zsh-profiling) not really I'm afraid. I did the majority of my zsh-prompt hacking 10 years ago and haven't thought about it since. That snippet could be from anywhere. You could peek at something like zprezto https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto or pure https://github.com/sindresorhus/pure for tips. Fetching git/hg/... info is always slow, so try and speed that up where you can (as to how to do that, uhh... I know my prompt has a dirty-state check nicked from pure for speed reasons). You can also cache any `asdf init zsh` or similar to a file and do the same "run in background" trick so the next shell will have any changes. The biggest improvement I can remember was dropping zprezto for my own much smaller config, I really did not need much comparatively. Mostly some git info and "good defau
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lt" options. I use zgenom for a plugin manager but only have 3 plugins, probably I should just dump it and inline the plugins to avoid getting owned one day.
In Carapace: A multi-shell completion library and binary
A lot of the tips from TFA can be done in BASH as well and I'm sure the following of my own zsh tips also have a bash equivelant, but I'd like to share anyway: Pure theme - My absolute favorite shell theme. Has almost all the bells and whistles of the powerlevel9k shown in the article, but looks, much cleaner and less in-your-face. After downloading the theme, I've added this to my `.zshrc` file: # PURE theme - see https://github.com/sindresorhus/pure fpath+=$HOME/.zsh/pure autoload -U promptinit; promptinit prompt pure Fuzzy find makes searching history much more powerful than what is listed in the article. I only use it together with ctr-r, but you can set it up for even more goodness. # Fuzzy find - see https://github.com/junegunn/fzf [ -f ~/.fzf.zsh ] && source ~/.fzf.zsh Lastly I've added a syntax highl
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ighter, which is really neat. # ZSH Syntax Highlighter - see https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting source $HOME/.zsh/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh I don't use oh-my-zsh, but I think my terminal is as fully fledged as even the best oh-my-zsh can offer.
In Zsh Tricks to Blow Your Mind
> I have a ZSH prompt that shows the Git status of the current directory. Entering in a directory that has a Git repo freezes the terminal for several seconds. For this specific problem, use a prompt that asynchronously updates git status. https://github.com/sindresorhus/pure is an example, and it contains all the primitives you need to implement your own async prompt. Otherwise good luck working on a huge repo like chromium, even on a faster machine.
In Pinebook Pro longer term usage report

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