Make the quickstart kit easier to customize without maintaining a separate fork

[unixorn]

I'd like to make the kit easier to customize without users having to maintain a separate fork.

@neiromaster, @seanb4t, @stts, @stevesea, I notice from the network graph that you all are maintaining separate forks. What changes would you like to see that would let you use the base kit? Should I wrap more of the kit's features in settings toggles?

[neiromaster]

At first, I used the zsh-quickstart-local-plugins-example plugins file to add some of my plugins to the set. But that ends up having to look at the original .zgen-setup file to see if there are any changes to it. Right now I have at least 2 new plugins and a few disabled. If the new plugins could be plugged in the same way as, for example, aliases through ~/.zshrc.d, that would be great.

[unixorn]

They're zgenom load commands, I could add a toggle command to skip the .zsh-quickstart-plugins file entirely, then you could drop a file into ~/.zshrc.d

Or maybe make it skip looking at the standard file completely if you have a custom one, it'd only be a file existence check and pretty quick.

[neiromaster]

I thought about how to implement a more convenient option, but I did not come up with anything sensible. I want to be able to add/remove plugins I need, but at the same time be "on edge" with the list of plugins in the main repository. Maybe I'm not explaining this correctly? We have a .zsh-quickstart-plugins file. At the very beginning, this file is taken from the example and contains a list of plugins as in the repository. Next, I want to remove some plugins and add others. Now the file is already different from the original one. But then you add a new plugin that I would be interested in, but I won't know about it because the plugins from the main list won't load if I replaced it with .zsh-quickstart-plugins.

[unixorn]

I'll look into adding some sort of update notification mechanism to display some changelog information. I want something that will only make an announcement once when a user logs in.

[YenLegion]

If I understand the documents correctly, is .zsh-quickstart-local-plugin only for removing default plugs? Also, .zshrc is linked to the project and not to be touched? If I want to add plugins I add them to .zshrc.d? Thanks, just a bit confused.

[unixorn]

You can either add a new plugin in a file in ~/.zshrc.d, or you can make a .zsh-quickstart-local-plugin file. If you're just adding plugins to the standard list and want to automatically get any new changes I make to that standard list (new plugins, new locations for existing plugins, etc) then the /.zshrc.d/000-your-plugins approach is better. If you don't care about changes to the kit's plugins, then go with creating a .zsh-quickstart-local-plugin file.

[neiromaster]

Can zgen or omz plugins be added to ~/.zshrc.d?

[unixorn]

It's actually best to put them in ~/.zshrc.pre-plugins.d - they'll be loaded before the standard list that way, and zgenom save will get run after the standard plugins (or ~/.zsh-quickstart-local-plugin if present) load.

[unixorn]

The docs were unclear on that, so #210 updates them accordingly

[neiromaster]

I will try one of these days to migrate the settings as in the new documentation, so as not to use the fork, and I will report the results

[unixorn]

Thanks, I appreciate having someone else test - when I test code I wrote myself I tend to unconsciously avoid the rough edges in it so having someone test who's coming in with no preconceptions helps a lot.

[unixorn]

https://github.com/unixorn/zsh-quickstart-kit/pull/250 (thanks @neiromaster ) made tweaking the plugin list a lot simpler. @YenLegion, you mentioned local plugins so have a look