Starship.rs: minimal, fast prompt for any shell (opens in new tab)

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.

here's a tip for people that I stole from PLAN9:

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.

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.

I hope others have a better experience than I.

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.

Same. The two work so well together. Been happy with both Fish and Starship for a long(ish) while now.

> 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.

<cue at least one complaint of this kind under almost any Rust-related project>

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.

Stating the technology makes you dislike the community. >.> Why are you on HN?

Well memory safety is a user feature. So "X but in Rust" has merit if X is written in C or C++.

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.

It's a marketing tactic, there is a non-insignificant people who will check out a project just because of Rust.

> 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?

I started thinking like that, but the general high quality and innovatio. of the various things rewritten in Rust has made me reconsider.

I think it has become a significant user feature.

cntrl-f "rust" -> 2 results

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.

Speak for yourself. It makes me love the community.

Rust’s memory safety definitely makes it a user feature.

"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.

Yes! This is why I pair the two up in https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu.

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.

You may want to set NO_COLOR: https://no-color.org/. A couple of big discussions about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30483417, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36098488

Well, in most casees you can configure it and back in all black and white\green if you want to.

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.

Fair enough but the usefulness of a tool like this is not the colors it's the additional context at the prompt

I like some colour but some tools take it way too far. As for emoji, the appropriate amount of them in a CLI tool is zero.

if the color conveys something meaningful then its good (imo of course)

is red on error, no color on success (of the last command) also too much?

I still think minimal is appropriate in this case as it shows only what’s relevant in the context.

I had a similar reaction to the out of the box config. However after spending a little bit of time with the doc, I turned off all the useless stuff like my docker version and but left stuff like git branch, status, exit code, etc.

it’s trivial to configure fwiw. with as much info as it is capable of showing it’s a stretch to think it’ll magically know what you want.

I suppose I “just don’t use other machines” and when I do, they suck and mine rocks, which I consider a lot better than “both sucks, but I am used to it”

If you want to, you can invest time in automating this so that you can feel at home at every boxes.

Surely it is some work to ensure your user environment are all the same across different machines. But it is also liberating as you are no longer limited to choose the few common features available everywhere.

If it's a machine that you're going to be working on a lot, you might as well have good tools installed. (And if it's a machine where stuff like starship would be bloat, then it's probably not something people should be SSHing into frequently).

Just FYI, Starship will only create your prompt; it won't alter the autocompletion behavior of your shell.

points for the FAQ

Starship maintainer here.

`custom` spawns a child process of your shell, so it's probably being slowed down by a slow shell init script. If the custom script you're running doesn't require your full shell customization to work, you can provide a custom shell command [0], passing an argument to not use your shell config. For instance: `fish --no-config` or `bash --noprofile --norc`

[0]: https://starship.rs/config/#custom-command-shell

You can install it very easily without permission (unless I misunderstood the permission part is not technical but political.)

Starship works pretty well without nerdfonts, BTW.

There is a new (soon to be default) preset which doesn’t use extra fonts. Also, any symbol can be overridden using the config file.

There's a pretty broad list of amended nerd fonts. Some of the more complete code fonts have most of the symbols already.

Maybe read through the documentation and try it out. It has very robust configuration options, many pre-built modules that are ready to include in your prompt, for example, one that prints git info for the current location if it's a repository.

So yes, it is kind of a competitor to p10k, but not zsh. It's just the prompt, and it just focuses on being a very good prompt tool.

this is a visual performance comparison between spaceship and p10k: https://asciinema.org/a/253094

It's simpler to configure and extend, and also more likely gets support for more exotic information-sources. It's a dedicated tool for this specific job, so following the "Unix-philosophy". And probably more optimized for edge cases like big git-repos and stuff. And you can easily switch shells.

I installed it via Brew and it just automatically updates.

Need to check on how to handle it on shells with no root access.

I just have release notifications enabled on their GitHub, and then update manually when I feel like it.

I have a bookmark-folder of release-sites and changelogs I visit ever some months. Though, they are on github, which has a Newsfeed, so at some point I switch to a feedreader or mail-forwarder to have this more under control. But I'm still searching for something good.

I use scoop on PC and homebrew on Mac. I run their update scripts weekly to pull the latest versions.

Yes. I use it for years. No problems.

I do.

I'd like to have some usefull information about my session but also prefer when my input begins from the first column.

I like my prompt being a separator between the output of the previous cmd and the next cmd I type.

If you find that wasteful, you can use the “transient prompt” feature to only print the full prompt to the current line, but keep the command history on one line per command in the terminal.

In contrast to the minimalist philosophy, I want to have as much visual information about the active state of my session as possible. So many stories of deleted files and databases, botched git actions and server crashes due to admins/devs forgetting which folder/host they are on, or which user they are logged in as, or whether the previous command failed or not.

I don’t like my commands starting at a different column depending on which directory I’m in.

I can see arguments for both sides.

Personally, I find the extra blank line to be a useful visual separator between lines of output. Particularly useful when running commands with lots of output or 'cat'-ing files or logs.

I also can't understand the two-line prompt. I want my prompt to take as little space as possible.

lot of information that'd be nicer to have at a higher level than the prompt, like the tmux or screen status bar. Be even better if a "prompt" like this could set a variable using ANSI escapes that various terminal emulators could display.

The homepage is somewhat misleading, you can use it without Nerd Fonts and there's actually a preset config listed for it mentioned on the Presets page [0] with the note:

> This preset will become the default preset in a future release of starship

It also links to an open issue on the GH repo about it [1] (although that issue is 2 years old and doesn't seem to be top priority.)

[0]: https://starship.rs/presets/#nerd-font-symbols

[2]: https://github.com/starship/starship/pull/3544

Many code fonts have the bat majority of the symbols already. The new MS Terminal for Windows uses Cascadia, and IIRC only missing the node logo IIRC.

Other fonts work to. I use Fira Code myself.

It works fine out of the box on mac and windows, have not tried it on linux yet (only over ssh).