Customize your shell prompt with Starship

Overview

Starship is a shell customization tool that enables you to see:

• When you’re inside a GitHub Repo, if you have pending changes, etc.
• When you’re inside a Python directory.
• When you’re logged in to a specific Google Cloud account if using the gcloud CLI.
• And a lot more

I tried Oh My Zsh, on macOS but since it installs different themes and plugins, there was a 5-second delay every time I opened a new shell, which I hated. Probably it was a misconfiguration error on my side, but I don’t care, I just uninstalled it and decided to go with Starship. If I need more plugins in the future, I’ll just install them myself.

Installation

This guide will show the steps to install Starship in Linux and macOS, but it can be installed in many different OSs, the installation instructions can be found on their main page.

• It can also be installed through package managers, instructions for that are on their page

   

First, you’ll need to know what type of shell you’re using

• As you can tell below, on this host, I’m using bash, and it’s running Debian
• If you’re using a different shell, go to their page for instructions

echo $SHELL

krishna@docker1:~$ echo $SHELL
/bin/bash

Since Starship directly modifies the shell prompt, it doesn’t matter which terminal emulator you use, it can be the default one, iTerm2, etc.

Install on Linux using bash

Install the latest version

curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sh

   

Add eval "$(starship init bash)" to the end of your ~/.bashrc

• The following command will append it to the end of the file

echo 'eval "$(starship init bash)"' >> ~/.bashrc

   

You can confirm it was added

tail -n 2 ~/.bashrc

   

Apply the changes to your shell for the changes to take effect

source ~/.bashrc

Install on macOS using Zsh

Install the latest version

curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sh

   

Add eval "$(starship init zsh)" to the end of your ~/.zshrc file

• My .zshrc file didn’t exist so I had to create it first
• Once the file is created the following command will append it to the end of the file

echo 'eval "$(starship init zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc

   

You can confirm it was added

tail -n 2 ~/.zshrc

   

Apply the changes to your shell for the changes to take effect

source ~/.zshrc

Customize your config

If you want to customize your prompt, all the changes by default need to be applied in the ~/.config/starship.toml file, you don’t even need to source .bashrc or .zshrc, once you save the changes, they’ll be applied to the prompt automatically.

Instead of manually applying the config changes, I like to clone the config from my GitHub repo, and point Starship to that cloned config. You would find this useful in case you want to have your config in a GitHub repo, clone it to a new machine, and if needed, push the changes back to the repo to keep everything in sync. All you’d need to do is a Git pull in all your other devices. This is just a matter of preference and is discussed in the next section, so you can skip to that section if needed.

   

If you want your shell prompt to look like mine (image shown on top):

First, create the starship. toml file

mkdir -p ~/.config && touch ~/.config/starship.toml

   

Then apply my configuration (as of Jun 2023)

• Just copy and paste the command below
• This file can also be found in my github repo (the file may change as I apply new changes)

cat <<'EOT' >> ~/.config/starship.toml
# vim ~/.config/starship.toml

[character]
success_symbol = '[\$](bold green)'

[username]
style_user = '#a6aaf1 bold'
style_root = 'white bold'
format = '[$user]($style)'
disabled = false
show_always = true

[hostname]
ssh_only = false
format = '[@](white bold)[$hostname](#50fa7b bold)'
disabled = false

[directory]
style = '#00a5ff bold'
truncation_length = 0
truncate_to_repo = false
EOT

All of the different configuration options and themes can be found on the official page

Change default config file (OPTIONAL)

I have my config stored on GitHub because I like to use the same config in all different hosts, so I clone the repo inside the ~/github directory and then point Starship to that config file. This is useful in case you want to have your config in a GitHub repo, clone it to a new machine, and if needed, push the changes back to the repo to keep everything in sync. All you’d need to do is a Git pull in all your other devices.

• With the commands below you’ll create the github directory and clone the repo

cd && mkdir -p github && cd github
git clone https://github.com/linkarzu/starship-config.git && cd

   

To point Starship to the newly cloned repo:

If you’re using ~/.bashrc

echo "export STARSHIP_CONFIG=~/github/starship-config/starship.toml" >> ~/.bashrc

If you’re using ~/.zshrc

echo "export STARSHIP_CONFIG=~/github/starship-config/starship.toml" >> ~/.zshrc

   

Don’t forget to apply the changes to your shell for the changes to take effect

If you’re using Bash

source ~/.bashrc

If you’re using Zsh

source ~/.zshrc

   

If you followed all the steps, your config should look something like the one on the image at the top of the page

• Shows you the full path, if you’re on a GitHub repo and what branch, and if there are pending changes