Display command duration in ZSH

June 8, 2021
zsh

Often I want to find out how long a shell command took to either benchmark it or figure out how expensive it would be to run it multiple times.

There already exists a ZSH plugin called timer that does this but I wanted to change the time format and make the text color more subtle. The screenshot below shows the result:

terminal screenshot

To install it clone the repo https://github.com/tom-auger/cmdtime into your ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins/ directory:

$ cd ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins
$ git clone https://github.com/tom-auger/cmdtime

Then edit ~/.zshrc and add to the list of plugins:

plugins=(cmdtime other_plugins)

Finally reload your ZSH config to apply:

$ source ~/.zshrc