[scary-size]

Yes, I was about to propose this. But then again, the author wants to learn the basics without grappling with abstractions. I think zx can be a bit quirky.

[pavlov]

For sure there's an element of magic to zx. The use of tagged template literals doesn't look like plain JavaScript even though it's standard.

You need to understand async/wait, promises and tag functions to make sense of this basic zx example:

  await $`ls -la`