Case insensitve tab completion zsh without increasing startup time significantly

Question

So I wanted to get away from oh-my-zsh because it made my shell startup lag noticeably (>0.1s). Indeed, after removing oh-my-zsh the startup time went to 0.02s but now I started adding features manually back in. First and foremost, the case insensitive tab completion. For this reason I added something like

autoload -U compinit compinit zstyle ':completion:*' matcher-list 'm:{[:lower:]}={[:upper:]}'

to my .zshrc. However, this one small feature alone increased my startuptime almost threefold, whereas other feature like syntax highlighting or autosuggestions don't seem to impact the startup time at all.

In bash I can get the desired case insensitive completion simply via bind 'set completion-ignore-case on' without any performance decrease (startup time ~ 0.01s).

I have no idea what compinit does, but is there no way to get case insensitive completion in zsh without slowing down startup significantly?

Answer 1

Just use Powerlevel10k's instant prompt feature and you'll be able to add whatever you like to your .zshrc without slowing down your startup time.

Answer 2

You could add the "compinit" references on the .zlogin instead of .zshrc, in my case the loading time improved a lot. I also have a test to recompile the compinit only once a day.

autoload -Uz zrecompile
autoload -Uz compinit
dump=$ZSH_COMPDUMP

# http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Conditional-Expressions.html
if [[ -s $dump(#qN.mh+24) && (! -s "$dump.zwc" || "$dump" -nt "$dump.zwc") ]]; then
    compinit -i d $ZSH_COMPDUMP
    zrecompile $ZSH_COMPDUMP
fi
compinit -C

On my .zshenv I have this to avoid loading global configuration:

unsetopt GLOBAL_RCS
skip_global_compinit=1
setopt noglobalrcs