I teach a university course that uses NodeJS. We currently recommend nvm to our students for installing the correct Node version. Because these students are relative beginners at programming, any issues they encounter during the setup process are very difficult for them to diagnose and debug, and so good error messages are critically important. Of course, good error messages are helpful for all users, not just beginners.

In this case, a student's .zshrc file was owned by root rather than by their user. I believe this has something to do with them incorrectly installing some other development software (possibly Anaconda based on the contents of their .zshrc?). When this happened, the installation script from the readme reported an error saying that it could not write to the file. However, nvm's error message did not make the reasons for the issue clear. When this stage of the installation fails, it would be great if it could check the owner of the file, in order to provide helpful information about why adding it to the configuration failed. It would also be helpful to provide an example of the content that should be added to the .zshrc, so that users have the option to configure it themselves.