Re: Official plugin manager?

[Roman Perepelitsa <roman.perepelitsa@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 2, 2020 at 12:04 PM Daniel Shahaf <d.s@daniel.shahaf.name> wrote:
> [...] let's talk about problems

I've switched to Zsh in early 2019. I don't claim to be a typical user
but perhaps my recollection of the transition will illuminate some of
the difficulties new users face.

The only shell I'd used prior to switching to Zsh was Bash. My rc
files were based on the stock configs supplied by the distro. Over the
years I'd added a few `export`, `alias` and `bind` statements, but
other than that I hadn't changed anything. When upgrading my distro I
would transfer over my rc changes to the new stock files.

When I decided to try zsh, my distro of choice was Ubuntu. The
installation of zsh was as easy as I could ask for -- just `sudo apt
install zsh`. When I typed `zsh`, I was greeted by the new user
dialog. This was a pleasant surprise turned sour. I tried going
through all options to see the whole configuration space but gave up
after a few minutes as I was unable to understand the implications of
my answers. I quit the dialog without writing ~/.zshrc. My idea was to
see what the experience is like without a custom config. It was
intimidating. Prompt was missing the information I was used to (the
default Bash prompt in Ubuntu shows user@host and the current
directory in different colors). Basic keys such as home, end or delete
didn't work. I fired zsh again to try the new user dialog once more
and chose the "recommended" option. This hasn't fixed neither prompt
nor key bindings. I deleted ~/.zshrc and gave the new user dialog one
last try. This time I went through every single option to see if it'll
ask me about prompt and key bindings anywhere. No such luck. At this
point I googled "zsh basic config" or something like that. All top
results said to install Oh My Zsh, so I did. This gave me prompt
closer to what I wanted and my keys worked.

I should note that Bash without user rc files is also underwhelming.
While the basic keys still work, prompt is `bash-4.4$`. What makes the
out-of-the-box Bash experience decent on Ubuntu is /etc/skel/.bashrc,
which becomes ~/.bashrc for new users.

Roman.