Re: Best practices for managing aliases in ohmyzsh?

[Steve Dondley <s@dondley.com>]

On 2021-08-31 04:26 AM, Roman Perepelitsa wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 1:23 AM Steve Dondley <s@dondley.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Now you've got me wondering. While I was bumbling around today, I
>> noticed I had an ~/.oh-my-zsh/.zshrc file.
> 
> This is unexpected. Oh My Zsh installer does not create this file.
> 
>> I'm only using the ~/.zshrc file, though. It has just one line:
>> ZSH_THEME="powerlevel9k/powerlevel9k". I'm guessing that's the
>> default because I don't remember editing it.
> 
> The default theme in Oh My Zsh is "robbyrussell". powerlevel9k is not
> included in Oh My Zsh. The fact that you are using it means you've
> installed it separately (or copied a config from someone else who
> did).
> 
> Note that development of powerlevel9k has been discontinued and the
> project has been archived.
> 
> On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 3:30 AM Steve Dondley <s@dondley.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Right. I had hunted around for an ohmyzsh list but didn't find one 
>> (but
>> if you know of one, let me know).
> 
> Oh My Zsh uses Discord for questions and discussions of this kind. You
> can find a link at https://ohmyz.sh/.
> 
>> > In general, zsh will not run bash code 100% correctly unless it is
>> > written *extremely* portably.  Your old functions almost certainly
>> > need to be tweaked to one degree or another.
>> 
>> My functions are very simple so I haven't run into any problems yet. 
>> But
>> I will definitely keep this in mind going forward.
> 
> This suggests that all or at least most of your functions could be
> scripts instead. Place each one in a separate executable file in a
> directory in your PATH (~/bin is a common choice), slap a shebang on
> each and you are good to go. This way you can use your utilities from
> any shell and won't have to port them whenever you switch shells.
> Since these utilities are proven to work in bash, use `#!/usr/bin/env
> bash` as shebang. You *can* also make them auto-loadable functions in
> zsh but you probably shouldn't. The only advantage would be that
> they'll execute faster but that matters only in rare special cases.
> The disadvantage is that you would have to port your scripts to zsh,
> make sure they can run with various shell options, don't pollute
> interactive shell environment, etc,
> 
> Roman.

OK, thanks Roman. This all sounds like good advice has got me rethinking 
things.

But I'm a little confused on a point you made. What do you consider the 
difference to be between a script and a function? My functions are 
typically called with aliases that I've set up. Example:

# usage: taskwarrior_cmd
# description: runs a task warrior command
cmd=${1}
shift
id=${1}
#echo $id;
shift
echo $cmd;
#echo $@
echo task $id ${cmd}$@
task $id ${=cmd}$@
#echo $cmd
if [[ "$cmd" =~ ^done ]]; then
     task +st  and \(+imm or +OVERDUE\) next
fi

Do you consider this to be a function or a script? I have this in a file 
in my ~/.ohmyzsh functions directory. I don't call this function 
directly, it is only called from an alias that looks something like 
this:

alias tdep="taskwarrior_cmd 'modify depends:'"