Lately I tried the stock ZSH install with gentoo and found it rather frustrating, to the point I would think ZSH was rubbish and would not use it again had I not done a little research and asking the community what I was doing wrong. The response I got back was that "oh-my-zsh" is pretty much the recommended solution to getting Zsh working painlessly how I expect it to work. Most people would probably have just bailed, because there's no obvious path anywhere in our Zsh install that will lead them to a happy solution ( I wrote up my painful first time experience here if you get what I mean : https://gist.github.com/1335445 ) So, I propose something that would be nice is: a) For Oh-My-Zsh ( https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh#readme ) to be packaged for gentoo. b) Have ZSH installion possibly emit warnings/messages to the user hinting at them to try oh-my-zsh with just enough to get them go. c) Possibly have ZSH advertise oh-my-zsh via a USE="easy" or similar useflag that causes a PDEPEND on oh-my-zsh d) or even have a use flag that installs oh-my-zsh somehow as a zsh extension of sorts during zsh installation. Food for thought ? =)
You can find an oh-my-zsh live ebuild in the mv overlay, although I wouldn't want to use it: It loads tons of nonstandard aliases and customizations, and there is no proper way to select what you want.
I copied the summary from the readme file. Feel free to adjust if you can describe it better.
Honestly the way that oh-my-zsh stores itself in your $HOME and updates itself, it seems like it might be better to just put an einfo message to tell people to use it. I was in the same boat as you Kent. I tried it and wondered what all the fuss was about and then a co-worker told me about oh-my-zsh and that convinced me.
