LS_COLORS Explanation

A plugin trapd00r/LS_COLORS provides a file with color definitions for GNU ls command (and also for ogham/exa). Typically one does eval $( dircolors -b $HOME/LS_COLORS ) to process this file and set environment for ls. However this means dircolors is ran every shell startup.

This costs much time, because a fork has to be done and the program (i.e. dircolors) binary needs to be loaded and executed, and because dircolors loads the colors' definitions and processes them. Following Zplugin invocation solves this problem:

zplugin ice atclone"dircolors -b LS_COLORS > clrs.zsh" \
    atpull'%atclone' pick"clrs.zsh" nocompile'!'
zplugin light trapd00r/LS_COLORS
  • atclone"..." – generate shell script, but instead of passing it to eval, save it to file,
  • atpull'%atclone' – do the same at any update of plugin (the atclone is being ran on the installation while the atpull hook is being ran on an update of the trapd00r/LS_COLORS plugin); the %atclone is just a special string that denotes that the atclone'' hook should be copied onto the atpull'' hook,
  • pick"clrs.zsh" – source file clrs.zsh, the one that is generated,
  • nocompile'!' – invokes compilation after the atclone'' ice-mod (the exclamation mark causes this).

This way, except for the plugin installation and update, dircolors isn't ran, just normal sourcing is done. The every-day sourced file (i.e. c.zsh) is even being compiled to speed up the loading.