Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

starship.rs

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 216 posts

Re: Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

#2

Post by voidUpdate »

Does the speed of your shell matter? Surely the speed of the programs that you're running through your shell matter more. I've never been let down by how fast bash can tell a program to start running

EDIT: oh, i misunderstood, its just the prompt at the start of your shell... I dont think ive ever been annoyed at how fast that renders either

Re: Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

#3

Post by JimDabell »

I don’t understand why they market this as “minimal”. It’s got loads of features, and every time I see somebody use it they have a huge prompt with loads of bells and whistles.

My shell prompt is:

    : ▶
You don’t need an entire shell prompt customisation framework to be minimal.

Re: Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

#4

Post by mlenz »

voidUpdate wrote: post #2

Does the speed of your shell matter? Surely the speed of the programs that you're running through your shell matter more. I've never been let down by how fast bash can tell a program to start running EDIT: oh, i misunderstood, its just the prompt at the start of your shell... I dont think ive ever been annoyed at how fast that renders either

In this case it‘s about the actual startup time of your shell. When launching a new terminal, starship always need to perform its initialization. If it were slow, I wouldn’t use it because waiting seconds before being able to input anything is kind of annoying. That‘s what they’re referring to.

Re: Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

#5

Post by danpalmer »

voidUpdate wrote: post #2

Does the speed of your shell matter? Surely the speed of the programs that you're running through your shell matter more. I've never been let down by how fast bash can tell a program to start running EDIT: oh, i misunderstood, its just the prompt at the start of your shell... I dont think ive ever been annoyed at how fast that renders either

Some people like to put, for example, their current git branch in the prompt. To get that means at least naively, running a git command on every single line the prompt renders on. Git is fast, but it's easy to add a bunch of these and suddenly your prompt takes 100ms to render. Hit enter a few times and you'll immediately notice lag. For that reason, doing this fast does make a real difference.

Of course the fastest thing is to just not stuff your prompt full of detail.

Re: Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

#6

Post by Cthulhu_ »

JimDabell wrote: post #3

I don’t understand why they market this as “minimal”. It’s got loads of features, and every time I see somebody use it they have a huge prompt with loads of bells and whistles. My shell prompt is: : ▶ You don’t need an entire shell prompt customisation framework to be minimal.

Yeah this isn't minimal, this is maximalism - more information, more characters. They should just embrace being a maximalist prompt.

Re: Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

#7

Post by goriv »

voidUpdate wrote: post #2

Does the speed of your shell matter? Surely the speed of the programs that you're running through your shell matter more. I've never been let down by how fast bash can tell a program to start running EDIT: oh, i misunderstood, its just the prompt at the start of your shell... I dont think ive ever been annoyed at how fast that renders either

I used to use spaceship prompt before this, and it would often take 5s to open up a new terminal and wait for the prompt to load, starship is always instant (like a prompt should be).
Post reply on HN