Idea: Add `antidote search` command that let's users discover awesome plugins

[mattmc3]

Possible v2.0 roadmap feature: Add an antidote search command. This command, similar to brew search, could allow antidote to facilitate discoverability of awesome Zsh plugins!

One very simple implementation of this would be to use unixorn/awesome-zsh-plugins as the data source, and fzf as the interface to find plugins. We could simply antidote bundle unixorn/awesome-zsh-plugins kind:clone like any other bundle to ensure it exists. This has all the benefits of regular bundles, including staying up-to-date with antidote update commands. If parsing the Readme in Zsh proves difficult, we could always index it with a simple Python script to feed fzf.

It looks like the author of zinit might have even tried something like this before 4 years ago??? This proposal wouldn't require any commits to unixorn/awesome-zsh-plugins to work - it would just use its readme as-is. It would also not rely on zsh-plugin-assessor, whatever that is.

Possible downsides:

• Potential for increased (unwanted?) traffic for @unixorn
• Issues with antidote search related to upstream awesome-zsh-plugins might reflect poorly on antidote or cause user confusion. For example, Awesome-Zsh-Plugins:
  • has a lot of non-working or non-maintained plugins
  • could change the format of the readme in a way that breaks antidote's search
  • might not want plugin managers (like antidote) using their IP this way

Possible mitigations:

• A more robust index could be used that filtered out non-working or non-maintained plugins (this sounds easy to just look for recent commits, but I'm not inclined to make a massive curation project like homebrew requires, so it would have to be fast and fully-automated or it's a non-starter)
• Issue template that directs issues to AZP for broken plugins. Again, gotta make sure we don't just dump problems on Joe.

Still, this seems like an idea worth exploring for the future 2.0 release of antidote. @unixorn - you are welcome to weigh-in here if you have an opinions on this feature.

[unixorn]

I'm fine with you making antidote search awesome-zsh-plugins for data, especially if it doesn't involve making changes to its README.md.

[mattmc3]

I still like this idea, but am less convinced it's appropriate inside antidote. I don't want to have to cut an antidote release every time something goes awry upstream where I have no control. It's probably better as a separate dedicated project.