computer detective work

My phone was slow, so I rebooted it. And logged in again to my shell server. And got an error message about now finding 'zsh-syntax-highlighting/' I hadn't seen before. And my shell didn't have highlighting. I connected to the server's screen session and confirmed that yes, old shells have highlighting. Something's definitely wrong!

'ls', and I find 'zsh-syntnax/' [sic]. WTF? Why is that? Did something go horribly wrong with my last OS upgrade? Have I been hacked and pranked?

Fortunately I keep a really deep shell history, and found

'mv zsh-syntax-highlighting zsh-syntnax' from 9 days ago.

That answers how, but not who or why; I don't remember doing that!

But the history provides context, several other 'mv' commands renaming long filenames to shorter ones. Aha, I do remember doing that! I wanted 'ls' output to fit into more columns. So I did that to this directory without considering that some part of my shell configuration was actually using it. Whoops! And somewhat excusable, once my configuration is set up I don't have to twiddle with it much, I have aspects that are 25+ years old yet contributing positively to my experience.

One quick rename and edit of .zshrc to use the new name, and all is well again.

Dreamwidth activity pickup

I hadn't been paying attention to post dates... I thought I'd been checking my reading page often enough, but apparently not, because a newly active friend got completely buried until she commented today, and I have to go look for her posts that I missed!