> history | get 82076
    ╭─────────────────┬──────────────────╮
    │ start_timestamp │ 2025-06-24 16:46 │
    │ command         │ mpc play         │
    │ cwd             │ /home/work       │
    │ duration        │ 1ms              │
    │ exit_status     │ 0                │
    ╰─────────────────┴──────────────────╯

In fact, I only set up Starship when I started to do more pairing. It wasn’t for my benefit as much as it was for those watching my screen and checking the work, especially when operating on prod and confirming what we wanted to run. I just load up a separate terminal app for that so I don’t have to walk people through my setup.

I played with Starship for an hour this morning - the joys of 50 person planning meetings - but ultimately uninstalled it. I did like some of its options like command timing and success/error, but all the tool versions ultimately just felt like noise. Not worth the effort to maintain a complex custom config to trim it down to what I'd want.

For most of my career I used a very simple PS1:

    export PS1="\[\033[1;32m\][\t \u@\h \w]\\$\[\033[0m\] "

I've tried prompts in the past, and they mostly annoyed me, or never showed me useful information. I've been a happy starship user for several years now. I've got the config tweaked so that it only shows me things I specifically care about. It's lightning fast.

I think these kinds of over-optimization rabbit holes are a good learning experience, but I compare it to woodworking. A woodworker just starting out will spend most of his/her time building or refining the tools they need, learning techniques, coming up with ideas/designs and testing them, etc. But eventually the point comes where you have to get Real Work done and the tools and jigs have to wait until the weekend.

Linux is still my favorite desktop OS, but these days I just run Debian and KDE because "free time" is not a thing I have anymore and I care more about getting things done than having the most optimal computing experience.

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 command returned 1.)
  » 

It's also useful the other way: when a program emits and error and exits with "success".

For a while, I tried a couple of Christmas tree prompts which included all kinds of condensed Git status and other bells and whistles, but eventually tired of them and settled on:

- Exit status of the previous command, if nonzero.

- Current time, HH:MM, 24 hour format.

- user@host, red if euid 0, green otherwise.

- Current directory, shortened if the path has three or more elements, with home directory recognition.

- Current directory, full path, echoed as hardstatus and hence appearing in the terminal window title.

- The name of the current branch if within a Git repo.

- Prompt character, dollar/hash sign.

All those elements are meaningful to me, inasmuch as I can quickly orient myself using that information and explore further if I notice anything out of the ordinary.

I'm pretty sure that megaprompt programs like Starship could produce the above, but I like obtaining a familiar prompt with a minimum of external dependencies, and so have written it all in Bash, then ported to Zsh and various Korn shells, which was quite tricky. It probably wouldn't work on Xenix 286, but anything newer has a fighting chance.

I've tried prompts in the past, and they mostly annoyed me, or never showed me useful information. I've been a happy starship user for several years now. I've got the config tweaked so that it only shows me things I specifically care about. It's lightning fast.

That said my vimrc is 2 lines that i can configure manually, I don't touch bash config from Debian defaults and my fish config is vanilla save for a handful of functions because I'm a lazy. My ssh config is pretty heavily customized but mostly around what keys/usernames to default to for which hosts (see previous about lazy).

It also gives me the current branch in a directory that has git, just so I'm sure of what I'm working on-- but most of the time that's handled by whatever editor I'm using.

A few years ago I progressed to having the current directory in there.

The thought of running a child process to create my prompt every time I hit enter doesn't feel right.

    format = """
    $username\
    $hostname\
    $shlvl\
    $directory\
    $git_branch\
    $git_commit\
    $git_state\
    $git_metrics\
    $git_status\
    $package\
    $python\
    $rust\
    $env_var\
    $custom\
    $cmd_duration\
    $jobs\
    $time\
    $status\
    $shell\
    $character"""

# clean, simple, minimal

  PROMPT='%{%F{red}%}%~ %{%F{yellow}%}% › %{%F{reset_color}%}%'