I've been using Starship for quite some time, and it's awesome! Definitely recommend it to anyone who wants a fast, modern, and rich prompt.
Besides the product, the community is pleasantly awesome as well. I've contributed a module to it and the maintainer has done a good job reviewing and testing. Heck, they even have a Discord server for contributors.
I've tried a number of different shell prompt tools over the past few decades. I've disliked them all due to their latency. I don't want to "feel" the delay. They were all in scripting languages, be it native bash, or python or whatever.
I tried out starship about three years ago and it is so fast I don't notice its execution time at all. I switched and haven't looked back.
If your shell is ZSH and you have `setopt autocd` in your .zshrc (though I think this setting is on by default):
export PS1="%~; "
this will result in the prompt: `~; ` where the ~ will change to a path relative to home.
Why do this? Well; it means you can select and paste any line in your history: your prompt becomes part of setting the proper context and is part of the command. Just select the entire line. :D
I think a huge amount of these prompts are just fiddling with things because people think they are clever, not because they are actually useful.
My prompt for years has been:
: ▶
I add the hostname if it’s an SSH session and change ▶ to # if I’m root because those are both important contexts that should be omnipresent, but aside from that, I haven’t felt like I’m missing anything at all. The CWD is in the window / tab title bar, but I never need to look at it because the CWD is always so closely tied to what I am doing in the shell that it’s always top of mind.
Git information is extremely useful to me. I notice colleagues who don't have that tend to struggle using git on the command line and use git status nearly every other command (much as I tend to do when I'm remoting into a shell with a plain prompt).
Python venvs are useful too if you have a shell for running the program and other shells that just happen to be within that directory.
I like this approach. I tried using starship.rs but I have to say it does far more than I want it to and makes me feel like I'm not in control of my shell (e.g. it pulls a schema via an URL without any knowledge from me that it does so).
As a result, I've written my own small and concise PS1 which covers all my use cases:
## Add this to ~/.bashrc
force_color_prompt=yes
## show: user+hostname (if ssh), conda, venv, guix, and git
function prompt_command {
## styles and symbols
local RESET='\[\033[0m\]' ; local BLD_GRN='\[\033[1;32m\]';
local BLD_YLW='\[\033[1;33m\]'; local BLD_PPL='\[\033[1;35m\]';
local BLD_CYN='\[\033[1;36m\]'; local BLD_WHT='\[\033[1;37m\]'
local ITL_YLW='\[\033[3;33m\]'; local SEP='⋮'
PROMPT_DIRTRIM=2
export PS1=""
if [ -n "$SSH_CONNECTION" ]; then
PS1=${PS1}${BLD_CYN}'\u'${BLD_YLW}'@'${BLD_GRN}'\h'${RESET}
fi
if [ -n "$CONDA_DEFAULT_ENV" ]; then
PS1=${PS1}${SEP}${ITL_YLW}${CONDA_DEFAULT_ENV}${RESET}
fi
if [ -n "$VIRTUAL_ENV" ]; then
PS1=${PS1}${SEP}${BLD_WHT}${VIRTUAL_ENV##*/}${RESET}
fi
if [ -n "$GUIX_ENVIRONMENT" ]; then
PS1=${PS1}${SEP}${BLD_GRN}'GUIX'${RESET}
fi
if [ -e .git ]; then
PS1=${PS1}${SEP}${BLD_PPL}$(git branch --show-current)${RESET}
fi
PS1=${PS1}${SEP}${BLD_GRN}'\w' # short directory
PS1=${PS1}${BLD_YLW}'▶ '${RESET}
}
export PROMPT_COMMAND=prompt_command
The GIT status prompt is immensely useful. Not as useful, but still occasionally useful, are the prompts for language / tool versions. And how much time did the last command take. I make a regular use of that when I don't need sub-second timings.
If that makes me "thinking I am clever" then by all means, spend your life believing that. It increases my productivity though.
I love Fish, but I cannot for the life of me to get Starship working well.
Trying to get it working on WSL (Ubuntu 20.04 and Centos) as well as MSYS just wasn't happening. On the few occasions I did get it working, it was unbearably slow. Simple commands would have sometimes half a second of delay. I could time what was causing the slowdown and disable some of it, but by the time I got it bearable I had disabled basically all of Starship. Then there were font-related issues on top. Ugh.
Chiming in as another fish+starship user. It's hard to imagine using anything else now; I get just about every feature I would ever want out of my shell with essentially zero configuration, which makes it easy to replicate my setup across a ton of heterogeneous devices and operating systems.
I discovered starship when I started using kubernetes at work. Previously I relied on standard bash-isms for path, hostname, etc. but knowing what context and namespace I'm in before I execute a command is quite convenient. I'm normally not one to "customize" my CLI experience at all but this was a nice addition to the toolbox. Documentation is good, customizable, reliable and has support for a lot of things. Would recommend.
> Rust is not a user feature, it's an implementation detail
Sure, but keep in mind that in the case of open source software plenty of people will choose software written in their favorite language so that they can potentially contribute to it. Or simply because they feel more connected to something that is written in their favorite language. So I don't think it's completely irrelevant.
It might not be a feature, but it is a selling point. It conveys that it was written relatively recently, is more likely to support modern features in the shell, runs reasonably fast and is reasonably portable.
If it was written in JS or python I'd already start worrying about what package manager to install it with in which environment, installing it globally is an anti pattern but symlinking it to .local/bin might complicate it.
So IMHO, the language something is written in is not just an implementation detail, it informs me in how well it will perform.
It's a prompt. Writing anything for that purpose is code gardening, but hey it's in rust so I'm supposed to be excited?
That, in essence is the problem "X in rust" normally means "I've written something of low value IN RUST. Gimmee upvotes". Come back when the project is interesting regardless of the language.
The fact that this happens should be food for thought for part of the rust community. Because the way I see it, if they keep this up, a few years from now, they could, other than some obscure linux kernel modules almost noone uses and a good grep-alternative, be well along what I lovingly call the "Haskell Route".
I like that go and rust binaries are statically linked. This means that I can build an environment I like using these and bring them almost everywhere, wsl, Mac, Ubuntu, red hat, etc. For me, this is the feature of rust/go.
It's not only though I don't understand why is this getting you "tired".
Rust has memory safety built in (unless one goes VERY out of their way to nullify it) which to many, myself included, is a selling point. F.ex. I wouldn't be interested in the userland tools rewrite if they weren't in Rust.
> Rust is not a user feature, it's an implementation detail.
It is that, yes, but not only that. Again, memory safety. And as another poster pointed out -- statically linked binaries. That helps a lot with certain deployments.
Also consider that HN might not be the place for you if mentioning implementation details are ticking you off. That's more or less how this forum started in the first place: people discussing implementation details.
> Rust is not a user feature, it's an implementation detail.
Rust is the new C. It communicates that something is fast, but also secure, and new or a modern reimplementation of something old. So, in that sense, is it a user feature because it has established itself in a way that tells the user some important details.
Am I the only one who is getting tired of comments complaining about people put “written in Rust” in the title? Lately every post having “written in Rust” has a comment like this.
If you don’t care, ignore it. Why should it bother you so much?
"X in Rust" to me mean that I won't have to fiddle with it when installing it and it'll work out of the box. This isn't unique to Rust, Go does this very well too. It'll also be reasonably fast, not just because of the language, but because the community likes performance. For example, a few years ago I tried the tldr command. It was in Node.js and unbearably slow. There was a Rust implementation, tealdeer, that was way faster.
Switching to Starship was actually what inspired me to also switch from Bash to Fish. Purely because of the transient prompt feature, which is not supported for Bash.
With the transient prompt, you can have things like Git or Kubernetes status on your “main prompt”, but without always printing them in the terminal for the commands you ran previously. It keeps the history much cleaner, and therefore more pleasant to scroll back up. I've also configured it to print the time when the commands were executed to the start of the lines.
These context clues are especially important for newcomers to the command line. A CLI newbie who sticks with it might eventually progress to the point where they decide to ditch Starship, or to ditch fish, or to ditch both, but until they get to that point, the solid defaults and OOTB features of these two have a lot going for them. Meanwhile sticking someone in a '$ ' with no coloring, no autocompletion, and no real clues in the terminal itself is more likely to lead to them just giving up entirely.
Maybe it can turn into the default prompt as a library dependency after the Rust rewrite, but the rust rewrite needs to rollout before thinking too far ahead.
When everything is one big screen full of white text, I find it very difficult to visually parse out, separate, and focus on information. Colors help guide your eyes and provide context. They can certainly be overused, however.
Why? I don't think emoji are necessary, but they are just Unicode characters; the only objection I can think of is that they are "too playful", but if our OSS CLI tools, written as a labor of love in our spare time, have to be "serious", we are utterly fucked. Unix hacking has never worn suits and ties.
Unless we are talking about unicode support. Indeed, the software should make a basic inquiry to see if the shell/terminal emulator supports unicode and fall back to ASCII if not. But there is a difference between "I don't support unicode" and "my unicode support is broken": the latter needs fixing, and emoji are actually a good test case to see if you really support unicode.
A little bit, as I find that it can make me lose my trail of thought. Red errors for LSP or because something is wrong in the executed command is great though.
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Besides the product, the community is pleasantly awesome as well. I've contributed a module to it and the maintainer has done a good job reviewing and testing. Heck, they even have a Discord server for contributors.
I tried out starship about three years ago and it is so fast I don't notice its execution time at all. I switched and haven't looked back.
If your shell is ZSH and you have `setopt autocd` in your .zshrc (though I think this setting is on by default):
export PS1="%~; "
this will result in the prompt: `~; ` where the ~ will change to a path relative to home.
Why do this? Well; it means you can select and paste any line in your history: your prompt becomes part of setting the proper context and is part of the command. Just select the entire line. :D
https://github.com/larkery/zsh-histdb
My prompt for years has been:
I add the hostname if it’s an SSH session and change ▶ to # if I’m root because those are both important contexts that should be omnipresent, but aside from that, I haven’t felt like I’m missing anything at all. The CWD is in the window / tab title bar, but I never need to look at it because the CWD is always so closely tied to what I am doing in the shell that it’s always top of mind.Python venvs are useful too if you have a shell for running the program and other shells that just happen to be within that directory.
As a result, I've written my own small and concise PS1 which covers all my use cases:
Fast and easy to grok.So it looks like:
by default and in a git repo: in a venv: Note, these all use different font colors to be distinguishing.If that makes me "thinking I am clever" then by all means, spend your life believing that. It increases my productivity though.
* username if it's not "me"
* indicator if in `screen` or `tmux` session
* `cwd`
* in reverse-video or bold, on terminals that support that, to stand out
All these things have been useful many times.
Most often, which is shells on local laptop, the prompt is only a reverse-video cwd. The extras appear for less-usual situations.
I should add Git info.
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Trying to get it working on WSL (Ubuntu 20.04 and Centos) as well as MSYS just wasn't happening. On the few occasions I did get it working, it was unbearably slow. Simple commands would have sometimes half a second of delay. I could time what was causing the slowdown and disable some of it, but by the time I got it bearable I had disabled basically all of Starship. Then there were font-related issues on top. Ugh.
I hope others have a better experience than I.
Rust is not a user feature, it's an implementation detail.
<cue people telling me I should consider Rust a feature>
Sure, but keep in mind that in the case of open source software plenty of people will choose software written in their favorite language so that they can potentially contribute to it. Or simply because they feel more connected to something that is written in their favorite language. So I don't think it's completely irrelevant.
If it was written in JS or python I'd already start worrying about what package manager to install it with in which environment, installing it globally is an anti pattern but symlinking it to .local/bin might complicate it.
So IMHO, the language something is written in is not just an implementation detail, it informs me in how well it will perform.
That, in essence is the problem "X in rust" normally means "I've written something of low value IN RUST. Gimmee upvotes". Come back when the project is interesting regardless of the language.
Rust has memory safety built in (unless one goes VERY out of their way to nullify it) which to many, myself included, is a selling point. F.ex. I wouldn't be interested in the userland tools rewrite if they weren't in Rust.
> Rust is not a user feature, it's an implementation detail.
It is that, yes, but not only that. Again, memory safety. And as another poster pointed out -- statically linked binaries. That helps a lot with certain deployments.
Also consider that HN might not be the place for you if mentioning implementation details are ticking you off. That's more or less how this forum started in the first place: people discussing implementation details.
Rust is the new C. It communicates that something is fast, but also secure, and new or a modern reimplementation of something old. So, in that sense, is it a user feature because it has established itself in a way that tells the user some important details.
If you don’t care, ignore it. Why should it bother you so much?
I think it has become a significant user feature.
I think you might just be prejudiced. Do you have the same reaction to, say, SQLite?
https://www.sqlite.org/index.html
> SQLite is a C-language library that implements a small, fast, self-contained, high-reliability, full-featured, SQL database engine.
Rust’s memory safety definitely makes it a user feature.
I think it goes well with the fish shell: it's much nicer than the default, without requiring customisation.
With the transient prompt, you can have things like Git or Kubernetes status on your “main prompt”, but without always printing them in the terminal for the commands you ran previously. It keeps the history much cleaner, and therefore more pleasant to scroll back up. I've also configured it to print the time when the commands were executed to the start of the lines.
These context clues are especially important for newcomers to the command line. A CLI newbie who sticks with it might eventually progress to the point where they decide to ditch Starship, or to ditch fish, or to ditch both, but until they get to that point, the solid defaults and OOTB features of these two have a lot going for them. Meanwhile sticking someone in a '$ ' with no coloring, no autocompletion, and no real clues in the terminal itself is more likely to lead to them just giving up entirely.
https://github.com/srid/nixos-config/blob/master/home/starsh...
Incidentally, starship also gives a visual indication of whether you are in the nix shell or not, which is pretty handy when using direnv:
https://nixos.asia/en/direnv
Having 8 (or more) colors help when dealing with information though, at least when you need to get a quick result and not just dig into the man pages.
Unless we are talking about unicode support. Indeed, the software should make a basic inquiry to see if the shell/terminal emulator supports unicode and fall back to ASCII if not. But there is a difference between "I don't support unicode" and "my unicode support is broken": the latter needs fixing, and emoji are actually a good test case to see if you really support unicode.
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