separating functions, fpath, and autoload

[TJ Luoma <luomat@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm in the midst of an effort to try to learn some of zsh's more powerful
features, since I've been using zsh forever and feel like I only use 1% of
what it can do.

One of the things that I've wanted to do for awhile is separate out some of
my more complex functions to remove them from my .zshrc file and put them
into their own files. This should make them easier to track/change/etc and
it makes things a lot easier to read and debug.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to get it to work right. I'm sure I'm doing
something wrong because I don't really know what I'm doing, so I'll explain
what I've tried, and hopefully someone can explain where I've gone wrong.

I added this to my .zshrc

if [ -d "$ZDOTDIR/functions" ]
then
fpath=($ZDOTDIR/functions $fpath)
fi

The goal there was to add '$ZDOTDIR/functions' to the functions list, which
I think is the right way to do this.

I can verify that works, I think, by using 'echo $fpath':

$ echo $fpath
/Users/luomat/Dropbox/dotfiles/zsh/completion
/Users/luomat/Dropbox/dotfiles/zsh/functions
/usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions /usr/share/zsh/site-functions
/usr/share/zsh/5.3/functions

/Users/luomat/Dropbox/dotfiles is my $ZDOTDIR

The first file in '/Users/luomat/Dropbox/dotfiles/zsh/functions' is called
'msg'. For simplicity's sake, let's assume the contents of 'msg' is simply
this:

function msg  {

  echo "$@"

}

(It's actually more complicated than that, but that's the overall idea.)

I tried that, and then I tried

autoload msg

and I didn't get an error, but when I check 'which msg' I get this:

msg () {
# undefined
builtin autoload -X
}

so I've messed up something along the line.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Tj


--
TJ Luoma
TJ @ MacStories <http://www.macstories.net/author/tjluoma/>
Personal Website: luo.ma <http://luo.ma/> (aka RhymesWithDiploma.com
<http://rhymeswithdiploma.com/>)
Twitter: @tjluoma <http://twitter.com/tjluoma>