robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh — pull request #673 by ilikenwf (2011-10-21 02:10:13+00:00)
Title: Aliases Plugin for Custom Aliases

While I realize this is 3 dumb lines that could just be bypassed and let people paste their aliases into their .zshrc, doing it this way prevents people from uploading their aliases to their forks of this project which increases security.

Furthermore, just for the sake of having nice separation and compartmentalization, having a ~/.aliases file is nice, because you can then import them into .bashrc or whatever for consistency.