Re: Rewrite of zsh-newuser-install

[Marlon Richert <marlon.richert@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2021 at 10:22 PM Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> This is nowhere near specific enough.  Your response to Roman got a
> bit better, but what defaults constitute "better" and which questions
> to (not) ask is important for the discussion.

Well, actually, after reading the whole discussion linked to by Roman,
I actually feel that we can get away with asking exactly zero
questions from new users, as long as we provide them with a good
.zshrc file to start with and a welcome message that tells them where
to find it and to edit it if they want to change their settings.

Something like this:


Welcome to the Z Shell!

We've prepared a friendly set of default settings for you. Please try
out your new shell for a while to see how you like them. Once you've
settled in and want to know a bit better how everything works, you can
change your settings by editing the file `.zshrc` in your home folder.
Any old text editor will do.

More info is available by typing `man zsh` or by going to
http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/

Good luck!


And as to what defaults I think are "better"? To make that more clear,
I think it's probably best I go with Dana's suggestion:

On Sun, Feb 7, 2021 at 11:06 PM dana <dana@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> I haven't been following the list super closely the last several months but
> afaik most people seemed to agree in principle that a 'do the right thing'
> default config would be nice. Obviously as Bart said everyone is going to want
> to discuss exactly what that entails — it seems like just proposing the file
> with the settings you want would be a good way to start that process? Whether
> you do the work on GitLab or not doesn't matter, but most of the actual
> discussion would presumably be on the list

Yes, I think that's what I'll do: I'll create a draft of what I think
a new user's .zshrc file should look like, and then we can discuss it
here.


> I had started on my own fork of that repo at the time:
>
>   https://gitlab.com/okdana/zsh-sensible/-/blob/dana/sensible/zshrc
>
> But i ran out of steam after getting through the basics Daniel had originally
> included, and didn't think i'd have the energy to defend the more
> 'opinionated' choices i was starting to make. I was also unsure about how much
> explanatory text to include; i wanted to avoid an OMZ situation where nobody
> who uses it knows what any of it actually does, but re-inventing the manual
> was probably too far in the other direction

Yeah, I think that file contains way too much in the way of comments.
As Roman pointed out, most people don't read most text most of the
time.


> Maybe an inspiration, anyway

Thanks, it's much appreciated!