Use fnm, not nvm. It's faster.

TLDR: fnm is a faster alternative to nvm when it comes to initialising new shell. It isn’t quite as fully featured but it’s worth it IMO.

Like many developers, I more-or-less follow the instructions for installing nvm when I set up a new system, in order to be able to switch versions of node quickly.

…the script clones the nvm repository to ~/.nvm, and attempts to add the source lines from the snippet below to the correct profile file (~/.bash_profile, ~/.zshrc, ~/.profile, or ~/.bashrc).

export NVM_DIR="$([ -z "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME-}" ] && printf %s "${HOME}/.nvm" || printf %s "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/nvm")"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" # This loads nvm

The line which causes nvm.sh to run whenever you open your terminal adds somewhere from 500-1000ms to a shell init time for me. I’m certain I’m not the only person who has this problem because there are several results when you Google for nvm slows down terminal zsh which present solutions mainly attempting to lazy-load JavaScript tools whenever they’re invoked.

I’m not too keen on creating a script to lazy-load Node, Yarn or whatever. Firstly because none of the snippets worked immediately, and I’m super lazy. Plus, at the end of the day, the objective here is to get the appropriate node binary on your shell’s PATH, right? This shouldn’t involve a long load. I don’t want to wait 500ms every time I run node either, while it works out what version to use.

So I searched for fasterr than nvm and naturally, Google corrected my spelling. The first result was a Hackernoon post, all about @galstar’s fantastic fnm tool, titled fnm: Fast and Simple Node.js Version Manager.

I immediately installed it, put eval "$(fnm env --multi) into my .zshrc and opened a new shell. No noticeable delay!

I tried fnm install --lts - sadly, this isn’t an option. Thankfully, I happen to know that v12 is the LTS version so I used fnm install v12 and, unsurprisingly, that succeeded.

New terminal - no delay! Did node work? Yes!

Problem solved!

Pros and cons

It’s worth noting that fnm supports .nvmrc files, so whatever version a project needs will be installed by fnm install.

However, as I already demonstrated, the nvm option of --lts to fetch the latest Long Term Support version of node. There are relevant discussions and PRs about this in the fnm repo but I haven’t been able to work out a way which will automatically figure out what the LTS version is and download it.

For my purposes, however, this so far has been sufficient, and has already saved me somewhere in the region of 5 or 6 seconds in the last 24 hours, which I of course have used up talking to whoever would listen about how great fnm is 😅

Great job, Gal Schlezinger.

Why this post

First of all, I haven’t posted in a while and this felt worthwhile writing about. Secondly, I wanted to give proper kudos to Gal. And finally, I hope that this post will end up being associated with the search term nvm slows down terminal zsh, and maybe save some developers some time in finding the alternative to nvm that they might be looking for.

Heckle me on Twitter @basicallydan.