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Add to SafariWhen comparing Powerlevel9K vs af-magic, the Slant community recommends Powerlevel9K for most people. In the question“What's the best theme for Oh My Zsh?” Powerlevel9K is ranked 5th while af-magic is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Powerlevel9K is:
While notably more complex than most other oh-my-zsh themes, the developer has taken care to ensure that the two function naturally together, though the implementation can appear unwieldy at first.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Interfaces seamlessly with oh-my-zsh
While notably more complex than most other oh-my-zsh themes, the developer has taken care to ensure that the two function naturally together, though the implementation can appear unwieldy at first.
Pro Excellent documentation
Not only are all the possible variables clearly defined, most have visual examples as well. The gallery of screenshots shared by users is also well-curated and provides no end of inspiration for what you yourself might want.
Pro Support for all major families of patched font methods
Not only are the standard Powerline fonts supported, but so too are the Awesome fonts and the Nerd fonts, all offering a different approach to adding more glyphs to your standard mono-spaced terminal typography.
Pro Keeps terminal responsiveness high
One sad realization often encountered shortly after testing a new terminal theme or framework is that suddenly a noticeable lag is present when working in it. While it can happen with Powerlevel9k too, if you're deliberate in the elements you place in your prompt, it can also be mostly sidestepped.
Pro Plays well with almost every existing zsh framework or add-on
Powerlevel9k lists step-by-step instructions for integrations into a plain zsh shell, as well as how to intergrate it with: oh-my-zsh, NixOS, Prezto, antigen, Zplug, Zgen, Antibody, ZPM, and zim. No matter what you've already found to enhance your zsh terminal, this theme will complement rather than displace them.
Pro Sensitive to an extremely broad set of contextual environments
Powerlevel is capable of recognizing all of the following conditions and altering your prompt automatically to alert you or provide more relevant information to suit them: logged in as default user, logged in via SSH, low battery, background jobs running, whether the working directory is read-only or writable, VPN in use, operating with elevated privileges (sudo), vi mode (editing), working in a version-controlled directory tree, logged into AWS profile, dynamic display of Wi-Fi signal strength in the prompt itself, current partition free space, and so many more it's nearly obscene.
Pro Included with oh-my-zsh
Pro Great for skimming through lines of output
The colors and extra line of hyphens makes it very easy at a glance to see where one command ends and another begins.
Pro Shows directory and git branch where applicable
Pro Reliable
No incompatibilities between many different systems, fonts and OSes.
Cons
Con Very slow
Powerlevel10k is a fast reimplementation of this theme.
Con Project seems dead
GitHub issues don't get attention. No new features added in the last year.
Con Does not support 24-bit true color
Con Sometimes the path gets in the way
Even though it abbreviates paths with ~ when they are in the home directory, deeply nested files or long paths often force the prompt to be squished against the width of the CLI, or in extreme cases wraps around multiple lines.
Con Better options for 'full-screen' cli use
Out of the box it misses out on features like battery remaining, time/date, etc.
If you're using a terminal emulator with a normal desktop environment, this is typically done by a status bar, but if you don't have this you may be better off with alternatives.
