Lazy load & auto use

[Ahmed El Gabri]

I understand that this was mentioned in the README.md that we can't combine both, but I wonder if there is anything that can be done to make this work? I'd like to have both

Maybe when both are combined you just need to check if there is a .nvmrc file or not to load & use otherwise still be in lazy mode?

[Luke Childs]

Hey, thanks for taking the time to make an issue.

I'm afraid that wouldn't work as it's not just Node.js and global modules that are lazy loaded but also nvm itself. We use the nvm_find_nvmrc function (provided by nvm) to find the the .nvmrc file and ensure consistency with nvm. We need nvm to be loaded for this to be available.

We could resolve this by implementing the .nvmrc search in zsh-nvm but I'm not keen on this for two reasons:

1. zsh-nvm should wrap nvm with additional functionality, I want to avoid duplicating existing functionality.
2. The auto use option hangs the terminal prompt while it's checking for .nvmrc. I've tried to optimise it as much as possible. Also loading nvm/Node.js/globals would make it hang for a significant amount of time.

I'd suggest if you want to avoid slow shell startup but also use the auto use options you'd be better off using NVM_NO_USE instead of NVM_LAZY_LOAD. That way you'll have nvm (but no Node.js) available without much lag. If you navigate to a dir with an .nvmrc file that version of Node.js will be activated automatically. The only caveat will be if you don't navigate to an .nvmrc dir you'll need to manually nvm use default before Node.js is available.

[Ahmed El Gabri]

I was just hoping there is a way around it. I'm actually quite happy with my setup now, and I'm fine living with these caveats. Thanks for doing this!

[Edward Bramanti]

@lukechilds Been running some benchmarks, and I don't find there's a performance increase in shell startup time with having NVM_NO_USE set.

time zsh -i -c exit with NVM_NO_USE: 0.42s user 0.59s system 101% cpu 0.999 total
time zsh -i -c exit with NVM_LAZY_LOAD: 0.20s user 0.22s system 92% cpu 0.460 total

For now, I think I might stick with this, but there's still caveats:

if ! [ -f .nvmrc ]; then export NVM_LAZY_LOAD=true; fi
export NVM_AUTO_USE=true