Re: Rewrite of zsh-newuser-install

[gammafunction@vivaldi.net]

On Mon Apr 5, 2021 at 1:16 PM CDT, Daniel Shahaf wrote:
> 0. I recommend against reusing the name zsh-newuser-install for
> a completely different thing. Names shouldn't be overloaded.
> 
> 11. «print '\n'» prints _two_ newlines. That's too obscure for
> educational code.

zsh-newusers-install is replacing the old zsh-newusers-install.
This isn't educational code like the rest of the files in the
repo are.

> {1..4} {6..9}

+1 on all these.

> 5. what happens if the exec on the last line fails?
> 
> 10. Should zrestart use «exec»?

(Addressed previously) zrestart doesn't use exec because it
could fail due to an error in the zshrc that wasn't caught
by the zsh -n line before.

That said, the same should apply to the newusers function.

> 12. Some settings seems like they could break the principle of least
> surprise: e.g., FLOW_CONTROL, NUMERIC_GLOB_SORT, matcher 'b:-=+',
> check-for-changes (as opposed to check-for-staged-changes).

- FLOW_CONTROL is unset by default, the line can be removed
- Not sure about NUMERIC_GLOB_SORT, do you have a surprising example?
- The 'b:-=+' is only prefixes, and only for the options tag. I would
   actually almost prefer 'b:-=[^[:alnum:]]' to catch all kinds of 
obscure
   option styles programs use, make them discoverable from just typing 
'-'.
- (No comment on check-for-changes)

> 13. Recommend not to hide symbols from grep, as i
> up-line-or-{search,history}

I agree, brace expansions make it hard to search.

> 14. Use of «bindkey -s … '^Q…'» seems questionable. As a way to inject
> commands, it prints them to the tty and adds them to the history; that
> doesn't seem elegant enough for example code that all new users would 
> be
> pointed to.

(Personally) I would rather directory changes being added to history.

> It's also brittle in that it depends on ^Q not being
> re-bindkey'd to anything else.

I can write a proper widget.

> 15. hjkl bindings for menu selection:

I type during menu selection, and users will be able to as well.
I think being able to type normally, except for a select few letters
would be confusing.

> 18. Show how to use terminal colours/attributes other than the basic
> ones. E.g., I use ${terminfo[dim]} in some places.

We already 'autoload -Uz colors; colors', so $colors[faint] may be
preferred. Although it doesn't have \e[ like $terminfo[dim] does.