problem with zsh install

[dalohuer2004]

Hi Alan! 👋

First of all, thank you for Gentleman.Dots. I installed it on Arch Linux and I really appreciate the work you've put into the installer and the codebase.

I am experiencing an issue where the installation process cuts short and fails during the package installation phase, specifically when it tries to install zsh and other shell utilities via pacman.

What I observed

The installer starts correctly, configures Ghostty and the fonts without any issues, but when it reaches the step to install zsh and its components, the process completely stops and throws the following error:

command failed: sudo pacman -S --needed --noconfirm zsh carapace zoxide atuin zsh-autosuggestions zsh-syntax-highlighting zsh-auto...
exit code: 1

Because of this, the installation fails entirely, and I have to restart the process from the beginning, resulting in the same loop.

Why I noticed it

The curious thing is that zsh and all the other components listed in that command (carapace, zoxide, atuin, etc.) are already manually installed and fully functional on my system.

It seems that even though the --needed flag is present in the pacman command, something is causing the package manager (or the wrapper script) to return an exit code 1 instead of skipping them or verifying them correctly, which ends up breaking the installer execution flow.

Question

Is there a known issue with how the installer handles already existing core dependencies on Arch Linux, or is there a way to bypass this specific check since the packages are already present?

I hope this information helps to debug the installer. If you need any logs or further details about my environment, please let me know.

Thanks again for the project! 🙂

[mgiuh]

Hi! 👋

Thanks for the detailed report — I reproduced the issue and found the root cause.

The problem: The installer uses pacman to install all packages, but carapace and zsh-theme-powerlevel10k are AUR packages, not in the official Arch repos. Pacman can't install them, so it fails with exit code 1 even with --needed.

The fix: I've added AUR helper detection (yay/paru) to the installer. Now it:

1. Detects if you have yay or paru installed
2. Installs official packages with pacman
3. Installs AUR packages with your helper

The fix is still in testing on my end. I'll submit a PR in a few days once I verify everything works across different scenarios.

If you want to test it now, you can install yay or paru and the current installer should at least skip the failing packages (they'll install manually later).

Thanks for the clear bug report! 🙌