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by rgoulter 880 days ago
Starship's an excellent prompt replacement.

I think it goes well with the fish shell: it's much nicer than the default, without requiring customisation.

3 comments

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.

I’m not sure I understand. Do you have a screenshot shot of something with and without transient prompt that shows the difference?
There's a good example in the Oh My Posh documentation: https://ohmyposh.dev/docs/configuration/transient
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.