Comment by nickjj

When I switched to zsh 5 years ago, I went with a stock set up too.

There's quite a few things the OP's post didn't mention about shell history that I think are really important:

    setopt HIST_IGNORE_ALL_DUPS # Never add duplicate entries.
    setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE    # Ignore commands that start with a space.
    setopt HIST_REDUCE_BLANKS   # Remove unnecessary blank lines.

It's possible to roll your own prompt that does helpful things without using starship.

Also you can roll your own zsh plugin manager in a few lines of shell scripts, `fast-syntax-highlighting` is a really useful plugin to get real-time feedback when typing commands.

Most of those things are mentioned here https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/i-recently-switched-to-zsh-an..., the post is 5 years old but just about all of that is what I do today still. Since then it has evolved to become better IMO, including using a dedicated Vim zsh plugin which is much improved over the default zsh key binds. Also another plugin to show zsh's tab complete in fzf instead of zsh's window. The tab complete demo video is here https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/hooking-up-fzf-with-zsh-tab-c....