Alternate Ice Syntax

The Standard Syntax

The normal way of specifying ices and their values is by concatenating the ice name and its value quoted, i.e.:

zinit wait"1" from"gh-r" atload"print Hello World"
zinit load …

(note that there's no ice subcommand - that is currently being fully allowed)

The Alternative Syntaxes

However, Zinit supports also other syntaxes: the equal (=) syntax:

zinit wait=1 from=gh-r atload="print Hello World"
zinit load …

the colon (:) syntax:

zinit wait:1 from:gh-r atload:"print Hello World"
zinit load …

and also – with conjunction with all of the above – the GNU syntax:

zinit --wait=1 --from=gh-r --atload="print Hello World"
zinit load …

Summary

It's up to the user which syntax to choose. The original motivation behind the standard syntax was: to utilize the syntax highlighting of editors like Vim – and have the strings following ice names colorized with a distinct color and this way separated from them. However, with the zdharma-continuum/zinit-vim-syntax syntax definition this motivation can be superseded with the Zinit-specific highlighting, at least for Vim. NOTE: the Vim syntax doesn't yet support the alternate syntaxes, it will soon (PR welcomed).