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

Post by wocram » Wed, Jun 25, 2025, 2:28 AM UTC

deathanatos wrote: post #127

m000 wrote: post #109

I would be very curious to see an age demographic chart of people using e.g. Starship. Personally, over time, I have stopped caring too much about prompt customization. I concluded that, no matter how carefully you curate your prompt, 90% of the information shown will be irrelevant 90% of the time*. After a while, your brain will start perceiving this as visual clutter and filter it out, to the point you may even for…

As a counterpoint, one of the most useful customizations I've made to my prompt is to emit the exit status of the prior command. Knowing that something failed is a useful signal, esp. when sometimes the thing failing just fails to emit any output that indicates that it failed. I only emit it if the prior command fails, too, so it doesn't clutter things the 90% of the time things are working. » true » false (last comm…

Post by wocram » Wed, Jun 25, 2025, 2:31 AM UTC

yankcrime wrote: post #76

Ignore the haters - I too am a fan of minimalism in my terminal since I don't appreciate unnecessary clutter or decoration, but context is king and Starship can be configured as such. By default my prompt is a shows me the current directory, the time, and a single character '%'. If I set something in my environment for which I need to be contextually aware - i.e if I have KUBECONFIG or OS_CLOUD - then the prompt is u…

Post by deathanatos » Wed, Jun 25, 2025, 4:17 AM UTC

m000 wrote: post #147

deathanatos wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, one of the most useful customizations I've made to my prompt is to emit the exit status of the prior command. Knowing that something failed is a useful signal, esp. when sometimes the thing failing just fails to emit any output that indicates that it failed. I only emit it if the prior command fails, too, so it doesn't clutter things the 90% of the time things are working. » true » false (last comm…

That's useful indeed. Did you custom-code it, or is it e.g. an ohmyzsh plugin or something?

Post by faizmokh » Wed, Jun 25, 2025, 5:28 AM UTC

Asraelite wrote: post #24

faizmokh wrote: post #8

Tried it. Not a fan. I find it unnecessarily fancy.

Then customize it not to be. Are you criticizing it for having too many configuration options?

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Wed, Jun 25, 2025, 6:25 AM UTC

MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #123

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #17

I like maximalist prompts, and indeed Starship is what Shell Bling Ubuntu [1] installs on a new dev machine. But they're not everyone's cup of tea. If I wanted to recommend to someone the min-maxed, highest density thing they could add to their prompt, it would simply be the time your current prompt appeared + the amount of time the last command you ran took. These two pieces of information together make it very easy…

nushell does that out of the box: > history | get 82076 ╭─────────────────┬──────────────────╮ │ start_timestamp │ 2025-06-24 16:46 │ │ command │ mpc play │ │ cwd │ /home/work │ │ duration │ 1ms │ │ exit_status │ 0 │ ╰─────────────────┴──────────────────╯ It's really nice, because it doesn't just tell you time between command executions (or rather time between commands finishing), but the actual runtime duration of t…

     history | where exit_status == 127 | last | get duration
    2sec 410ms

      × Types 'duration' and 'int' are not compatible for the '-' operator.
       ╭─[entry #47:1:2]
     1 │ (history | where exit_status == 127 | last | get duration) - 10
       ·  ───┬───                                                   ┬ ─┬
       ·     │                                                      │  ╰── int
       ·     │                                                      ╰── does not operate between 'duration' and 'int'
       ·     ╰── duration
       ╰────