Thank you for the recommendation, I might then also be able to ditch sdkman as well.

I don't remember when I did it, but it looks like I must have gone through this at some point (maybe due to using GNU Make a lot? Or perhaps it was some other tool) - my zsh setup does a bunch of autocomplete setup only in the interactive case, and it seems to help a bit with startup time, at least on macOS:

    % for i in {1..5}; do /usr/bin/time zsh -i -c exit; done # zsh in interactive mode
            0.05 real         0.03 user         0.02 sys
            0.02 real         0.01 user         0.01 sys
            0.02 real         0.01 user         0.00 sys
            0.02 real         0.01 user         0.00 sys
            0.02 real         0.01 user         0.00 sys
    % for i in {1..5}; do /usr/bin/time zsh -c exit; done # zsh in non-interactive mode
            0.01 real         0.00 user         0.01 sys
            0.01 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys
            0.00 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys
            0.00 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys
            0.00 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys

Developers that are very heavily invested in terminal and (over) optimize their terminal configuration are a small but very vocal minority.

I can't understand Ghostty either except as some kind of trendy memetic thing, the $GME of the TTY world.

You need to figure out what is going on because that certainly isn't normal.

Literally seeing 0.0% on Linux

I started using it expecting to love it, but in reality it didn't seem to gain me anything but in fact was worse in several major ways. Also less configurable than Iterm2. :/

    if [ "$SESSION_TYPE" != 'remote/ssh' ]; then
     if [ "${TERM_PROGRAM}" != 'tmux' ]; then 
      ( if [ $[RANDOM % 10] == "0" ]; then fortune -n 40 -s; else echo "Hi, $(whoami)!"; fi ) | cowsay | lolcat && printf '\n'
     else
      if [ "${TMUX_PANE}" == '%0' ]; then 
       fortune | cowsay -f small | lolcat && printf '\n'
      fi
     fi
    fi

But what would life be without a little bit of fun?

— Kurt Vonnegut

I started to take your comment seriously until that line. You're avoiding leveling up and learning how to use the CLI. Whatever reason you are avoiding it for, understand that's what is at play here.

If you start 1 command and get 1 output, the terminal isn't particularly powerful.

One you do start combining commands then it's a totally different thing.

If your GUI does everything you need, then a terminal isn't necessarily useful. If your GUI doesn't provide a feature though, you are most likely stuck. You might be able to learn it's own API in a specific language, e.g. Lisp for Gimp, Python for Blender, etc. If though your terminal application doesn't provide what you need you can pipe its output to another terminal application and thus get something that none of those applications individual can. Once you have done it with 2 applications you can do that with 3, 4, etc. You can label those applications and re-use that tomorrow, share with someone else, etc.

The terminal isn't about starting one application.

In practical design, GUI applications inevitably deprecate keyboard abstractions in favor of graphical abstractions and graphical abstractions require parsing visual representations and are less conducive to "muscle memory" whenever pointer control is relative rather than absolute (which these days is approximately always [1]).

Keyboard oriented applications feel more like a language and human brains tend to map well to language and touch typing while GUI's rely on something akin (or identical) to hand-eye coordination. Hand-eye coordination is harder than touch typing and every GUI application requires developing a unique mental model.

[1] in the ancient days of digitizing tablets with absolute coordinates, it was possible to "touch mouse." But that's not how we do things today (and it would not work well with infinite scrolling, etc.)

Here are some advantages.

  - It is repeatable, you can do the same exact thing you did before. With ZSH history + FZF, recalling a command is a breeze.

  - Auditability. The command in your shell history is there for you to revisit and servers as a permanent record of something you did (or didn't do).

  - A command line doesn't make a mistake at 10th time, due to fatigue, inattention etc.

  - Reusability. You may have to repeat the same command for different folders (or remote servers). A slight modification of the previous command will do it for you.

my take is terminal is just quicker than "gui".

Of course, other tasks are nicer with a GUI and/or mouse/tablet/touchscreen (art creation for example).