I have been using zsh (Z-shell) for a long time. Recently it came to my attention that opening a new terminal was taking about 2-3 seconds which is quite a long time. Just to rule out some other reasons, I switched my default shell to bash and saw if it was still slower and turned out that was not the case. Changing default shell chsh -s /bin/bash Normally all shells load up some configuration, aliases, etc while opening a session, .