zsh-patina - A blazingly fast Zsh syntax highlighting plugin

Two weeks ago, I published the first version of zsh-patina, a blazingly fast Zsh plugin performing syntax highlighting of your command line while you type. 🌈

https://github.com/michel-kraemer/zsh-patina

I’m extremely proud that the project has received very good feedback from the community and gained more than 100 GitHub stars in just 14 days!

When it comes to how I configure my shell, I’m a purist and I don’t use a fancy prompt like Powerlevel10k or Starship, nor do I use Oh My Zsh. I like to configure everything myself and only install what I need. This allows me to optimize my shell and make it really snappy.

That being said, a fast prompt without any extensions looks dull 🙃 I tested some Zsh plugins like the popular zsh-syntax-highlighting and fast-syntax-highlighting. Great products, but I wasn’t satisfied. zsh-syntax-highlighting, for example, caused noticeable input lag on my system and fast-syntax-highlighting wasn’t accurate enough (some parameters were colorized, some not; environment variables were only highlighted to a certain length, etc.). I wanted something fast AND accurate, so I developed zsh-patina.

The plugin spawns a small background daemon written in Rust. The daemon is shared between Zsh sessions and caches the syntax definition and color theme. Typical commands are highlighted in less than a millisecond. Long commands only take a few milliseconds.

zsh-patina performs dynamic highlighting. Commands, files, and directories are highlighted based on whether they exist and are accessible. This gives you instant feedback on whether your command is correct and helps you avoid typos.

The plugin provides high-quality syntax highlighting based on Sublime Text syntax definitions. The built-in default theme uses the eight ANSI colors and is compatible with all terminal emulators. You can create your own themes of course.

Here’s another screenshot showing zsh-patina in action with the tokyonight theme:

If you want to try the plugin out yourself, just follow the install instructions from the README. I’m looking forward to your feedback!

License

zsh-patina is licensed under the MIT License.

Sponsor this project

If you or your company use any of my projects or like what I’m doing, please consider sponsoring me so I can continue maintaining and developing my projects and new ones!

Thank you so much for your support!

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Posted by Michel Krämer
on 28 March 2026

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