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

starship.rs

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

#51
post #35
post #15

every time your shell takes 100ms to render git status that you didn’t even need, you're paying invisible tax on flow. terminals should be reactive memory tools, not passive decoration. we optimize for code runtime but not for our own typing latency

Starship is very fast, taking only a couple of milliseconds to gather the data (and you can easily configure it to minimise what it'll spend time gathering). It's night and day compared to other ones I've tried, where the hundred millisecond-ish delays annoyed me.

Depends a lot on the system. I tried using it on Windows via MSYS2, and it seems like some Windows overhead (maybe process startup?) was causing Starship to slow it all down to a crawl. Disabling a few of the addons helped but didn't fix it. In the end I stopped using it.

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

#52
I live in the terminal, so I wrote my own prompt ages ago when I started learning Go[1][2], and before that I had a simple prompt in bash.

I like to keep things very simple and fast, so the directory and the git branch is all I need. I wonder if people really use all that information or if they set it up thinking they need it, but then never do.

[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/gosh

[2]: I should probably update that now that I know a “bit” more Go.

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

#53
post #15

every time your shell takes 100ms to render git status that you didn’t even need, you're paying invisible tax on flow. terminals should be reactive memory tools, not passive decoration. we optimize for code runtime but not for our own typing latency

we optimize for code runtime but not for our own typing latency

100ms optimization is a lot different for a CPU or a human brain. I'm not defending having the entire system log dumped out on every prompt but a few amenities are worth a few milliseconds computation time for a human.

Besides, I don't see how, for example , having your prompt take those 100ms to print a git branch or status breaks your "flow" yet having to type out the commands yourself and taking longer doing it doesn't.

Its a balance between bloat and and usability like so many other things, but, to me at least, being on either extreme of bloat or extreme-minimalism seems counterproductive.

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

#54

I live in the terminal, so I wrote my own prompt ages ago when I started learning Go[1][2], and before that I had a simple prompt in bash. I like to keep things very simple and fast, so the directory and the git branch is all I need. I wonder if people really use all that information or if they set it up thinking they need it, but then never do. [1]: https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/gosh [2]: I should probably updat…

The only thing I add is the time (hh:mm:ss), it's often-ish useful to roughly know how long a command has been running for (or how long it took after it completed)

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

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the timestamps are that important? Honestly asking. You can always time your commands with "time".

When you’re debugging, especially a complex system, especially during an outage or postmortem, understanding when your commands executed relative to when your log lines appeared is really helpful.

sounds like your describing https://linux.die.net/man/1/ts

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

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to ask the same. Long time ohmyzsh user, and wondering what new features / benefits Starship has.

Basically it is quicker. I also expect it has everything that you have in your prompt so is a direct replacement without losing anything.

I don't doubt that it can be quicker but:

1) I don't recall having a problem with prompt speed.

2) Are there any benchmarks?

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

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For personal workstation, the current directory is enough. Maybe I change the color based the status of the last command. That’s pretty much the only information I need before entering any command. Everything else can be accessed when I really need it.

You don't need to know what branch you're on before running commands? I cant tell you the number of times ive been on the wrong branch executing stuff.

I literally use just PS1='$ '.

`git status` to know git stuff. `pwd` for the current working directory, etc

I also don't use aliases like `gs` or `..`

One good thing about having a very minimal setup is that you feel at home anywhere.

It wasn't always like this. I used many, many prompts and shell tools over the decades. The only tool that stood the test of time is tmux.

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

#59
I ended up writing my own zsh prompt a few years ago and it's worked like a charm for my simple needs: https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/blob/master/zsh/dot-zshrc...

ends up looking like this: https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/blob/master/zsh/README_im...

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