Oh please. The exact same thing can be said for fish. How did the parent commenter know to create a file named ~/.config/fish/functions/foo.fish? How did the pa

Oh please. The exact same thing can be said for fish. How did the parent commenter know to create a file named ~/.config/fish/functions/foo.fish? How did the parent commenter know to define a function inside that file? The point is, it's trivial to create an autoloaded function in both fish and zsh. You don't have to look at the man page each time, which is what was being implied in the comment I was responding to. But to answer your question, you never need to call autoload with flags other than "-Uz" 99.99% of the time. So the idea that you have to consult the manual each time to figure out the flags is plainly not true. As for the fact that you have to call autoload to bring autoloaded functions into scope, what else did you expect? Fish's behavior of bringing undeclared functions into scope isn't exactly intuitive either.