Plugin Reports and Session Tracking

Summary

zinit report tracks everything a plugin modifies — aliases, functions, bindkeys, completions, variables, $PATH/$FPATH — and zinit times shows per-plugin load durations, making it easy to audit and debug a plugin setup.

Details

When a plugin is loaded with zinit load (not zinit light), Zinit enters investigation mode and records all changes the plugin makes to the shell environment:

Aliases defined/modified
Functions defined
Bindkeys registered (bindkey calls)
Zle widgets created
Zstyles set
Completions installed
Variables set
$PATH and $FPATH entries added

This data is stored per-plugin and can be retrieved at any time with zinit report {plugin} or zinit report --all. It is also used by zinit unload to undo a plugin’s effects.

Session tracking (dtrace/dstart, dstop, dreport, dunload) works similarly but for interactive commands run in the current shell session rather than for a specific plugin.

Load times are available via zinit times [-s] [-m] [-a]:

-s — display times in seconds
-m — show the moment each plugin was loaded (wall-clock time from shell start)
-a — show both times and loading moments

Statistics overview: zinit zstatus prints a brief summary of the Zinit installation (version, plugin count, etc.).

Other reporting commands:

zinit list-plugins [keyword] — list loaded plugins, optionally filtered.
zinit list-snippets — list cached snippets (requires tree).
zinit recently [time-spec] — show plugins updated recently (e.g. zinit recently 1 week).
zinit status {plg-spec} — git status for a plugin or svn status for a snippet.
zinit bindkeys — show bindkeys registered by all plugins.

Examples

# Load with full reporting enabled
zinit load zdharma-continuum/history-search-multi-word

# View the report
zinit report zdharma-continuum/history-search-multi-word

# View reports for all plugins
zinit report --all

# See load times
zinit times

# Show times in seconds with loading moments
zinit times -s -m

# Trace an interactive session
zinit dtrace
# ... run some commands ...
zinit dstop
zinit dreport

# Unload a plugin (reverting its environment changes)
zinit unload zdharma-continuum/history-search-multi-word

Caveats / Common Mistakes

zinit light loads a plugin without any investigation, so zinit report will show no data for it and zinit unload will not work.
zinit unload can only revert changes that were recorded during load; changes made by external processes or the interactive session itself are not tracked.