Re: zsh-newuser-install

[Martin Vaeth <martin@mvath.de>]

Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If nobody used oh-my-zsh, the world would be a better place. Or at
> least #zsh would be.

I agree with you that oh-my-zsh is horrible in many aspects.

But it has a major advantage which is why people use it:
It enables a lot of features which are off in zsh by default
and which many people are not aware of.

No, newusers does not solve this problem, because most
users simply ignore this, and most users will never read the
full manpage unless they have a particular problem.

I understand that most features are off by default to keep
compatibility.  However, in interactive shells compatbility
is not really an issue.  Perhaps one could enable much more
*interactive* features by default which are actually the
biggest selling point of zsh.
At least, some zshrc could be shipped which enables lots
of these features so that e.g. on a live cd where you "must"
live with the defaults you get more luxury (distribution
maintainers are not always experts in zsh, especially
e.g. those who produce live cds, so it is better
to give them good examples).

Some examples not mentioned yet by others:

Most people are not even aware that zsh can show
them what type of word they are currently completing
and even to describe them the purpose of options.
In fact, I suppose that most work done in the description
of options is done in vain for most people if something
unless something like the following becomes a default:

zstyle ':completion:*' format '%B(%d)%b'
zstyle ':completion:*' verbose true

Also, I realized that many zsh users did not know about
the goodies they can get from e.g.:

zstyle ':completion:*' list-colors ${(s.:.)LS_COLORS}

zstyle ':completion:*' menu select=1
zmodload zsh/complist
setopt no_list_ambiguous bash_auto_list
# (the latter to catch bash users)

REPORTTIME=5
TIMEFMT='%J  %M kB %*E (user: %*U, kernel: %*S)'

setopt cdable_vars
setopt auto_name_dirs
setopt extended_glob
setopt notify

# and with lesser importance

setopt numeric_globsort
setopt long_list_jobs
... many more options

Sure, for any option there are certainly some people who
prefer it differently or simpler, but for people who just
quickly check out whether zsh might be something for them,
they might get hooked to zsh when these features are on
in their testing environment.  They would probably not spend
the time to read the manual just to find out that such
features are avaible if they are not even aware that zsh
is able to do things like this almost "out-of-the-box":

This is exactly why people are impressed by oh-my-zsh.