Dependence on PCRE causes warnings on FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD

[dancrossnyc]

The use of rematchpcre forces a dependency on PCRE, which is not enabled in the binaries distributed via the packaged version of zsh on either FreeBSD or DragonFlyBSD. This, unfortunately, causes an error on each keystroke:

term% zsh --version
zsh 5.9 (amd64-portbld-freebsd14.2)
term% uname -a
FreeBSD term 14.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE releng/14.3-n271432-8c9ce319fef7 GENERIC amd64
: agni; source $HOME/.local/share/zsh-helix-mode/zsh-helix-mode.plugin.zsh
: agni; __zhm_find_line_start:4: failed to load module `zsh/pcre': Cannot open "/usr/local/lib/zsh/5.9/zsh/pcre.so"
__zhm_find_line_start:4: -pcre-match not available for regex
e__zhm_find_line_start:4: failed to load module `zsh/pcre': Cannot open "/usr/local/lib/zsh/5.9/zsh/pcre.so"
__zhm_find_line_start:4: -pcre-match not available for regex
ec__zhm_find_line_start:4: failed to load module `zsh/pcre': Cannot open "/usr/local/lib/zsh/5.9/zsh/pcre.so"
__zhm_find_line_start:4: -pcre-match not available for regex
h__zhm_find_line_start:4: failed to load module `zsh/pcre': Cannot open "/usr/local/lib/zsh/5.9/zsh/pcre.so"
__zhm_find_line_start:4: -pcre-match not available for regex
o__zhm_find_line_start:4: failed to load module `zsh/pcre': Cannot open "/usr/local/lib/zsh/5.9/zsh/pcre.so"
__zhm_find_line_start:4: -pcre-match not available for regex
 __zhm_find_line_start:4: failed to load module `zsh/pcre': Cannot open "/usr/local/lib/zsh/5.9/zsh/pcre.so"
__zhm_find_line_start:4: -pcre-match not available for regex
h__zhm_find_line_start:4: failed to load module `zsh/pcre': Cannot open "/usr/local/lib/zsh/5.9/zsh/pcre.so"
__zhm_find_line_start:4: -pcre-match not available for regex
i
hi
term% 

zsh on FreeBSD can be built from the ports collection with a PCRE configuration option that does the expected thing, but relying on packages to keep it up to date is going to be a chore.

It seems like the most straight-forward way to address this would be to switch to using POSIX extended regular expressions, and eschew the rematchpcre option, but given some of the REs in use, I'm not sure how reasonable that is; things like \A and \z have no analogue in EREs, and it's not immediately clear whether ^ and $ would serve as acceptable substitutes.

[Multirious]

That's unfortunate. PCRE is only used for multi-line features. It's kinda possible to hack around ^ and $ by using * so it repeatedly match multiple lines. I found this out because I started with just EREs. Thing is it was pretty ugly and makes thing unreadable because I don't know how to escape newline within a regex then. They looks like this. Like, "[^\n*]$" doesn't work. The new line has to be an actual new line. But I have learned more about Zsh string and expansion since then and maybe I'd be able to figure something out.

[dancrossnyc]

If Zsh string handling can do it, that'd be amazing. In the meanwhile, I'll reach out to the FreeBSD zsh port maintainer to see if they will consider adding PCRE support.

[its-all-waves]

Also an issue on macOS (13.7 Ventura). This is solved by using Homebrew's install of zsh, then changing your shell to the brew version. You can get the path to the zsh binary with brew ls zsh.

brew install zsh
sudo chsh -s /opt/homebrew/Cellar/zsh/5.9/bin/zsh $USER