Continuation of zinit project

[alberti42]

I would like to ask how many people are actively using zinit. I recently moved from oh-my-zsh plugin manager to zinit. It was a huge improvement. Zinit was not easy to learn at first, and often I had to review the code to understand what was happening.

I believe at this point I have a reasonable understanding of how it works. Are there still people interested to push the project? I am curious before investing time to make pull requests.

One thing I noticed is that the code is not much documented and written in a nearly obfuscated way. Probably it was a matter of taste, where writing very short-in-length code was appealing to the original author. I suspect that omitting new lines \n character did not speed up the code, but only much harder to read for us humans.

I think it would be important to first get a cleaner code without sacrificing in speed. I would add a lot of comments to the code. If it turns out that these slow down the execution, we could write a script to strip them away. However, in my setup, all zinit functions are anyway precompiled to bytecode. This is one-off operation. So my suspect is that comments would have zero impact on performance but would make the code maintanable for the community.

I also have several opinions about what missing and how implmenet new features. I created many workaround for my installation. Perhaps I missed some of the zinit features already existing? Very possible. I keep discovering new handy features nearly every day.

By the way, do we have a place for the community to store dotfiles related to zinit? I extended several of the examples I found about already covered packages. And I created new ones. I found that working with packages was not agile. For a small community, it has too much overhead, and anyhow, most likely we all want at the end to customize our installation. So I ended up using an alternative solution to maintain packages and avoid cramming too much code in zshrc.

Final remark, is there any communication with the other fork, https://github.com/z-shell/zi? I have the impression that the zinit / zi communities are fairly small, and it would be beneficial to join forces. I did not review the code of the zi project, so I do not understand yet in which way their implementation differs. From the man pages, they are mostly similar, if not identical. The zi project seems to have a few more updated documentation pages. But these pages do not contain any new feature that was not already in the original zinit project.

It would be great to see more exchange with the zinit community, perhaps on a discord server or simply through these discussion pages.

[pschmitt]

Collaboration with zi is not an option as far as I am concerned. Too many red flags.

https://youtu.be/pHVbjLTFmVo