starship – elegant cross-shell prompt at your fingertips

Last Updated on September 1, 2020

In Operation

A screen image couldn’t possibly do starship justice, so I’ve created a very brief video showing some of the information conveyed at the shell prompt.

There’s lots of other information the utility can display. You can see the current versions of Node.js, Rust, Ruby, Python, and Go. Java information is also displayed when a build.sbt file is present.

The Git repository information is comprehensive. One of the many highlights. The software uses a Powerline font to show various information. The utility also shows the current battery level and status.

You can also show current system memory and swap usage, saving you having to fire up a separate utility like htop. Monitoring RAM usage from the prompt definitely helps my workflow.

The video also doesn’t reflect the many customization options that are available. It’s one of the real strengths of the tool. You can make your prompt as beautiful as you desire. Things you can configure include:

• Define the order in which modules are shown in the prompt.
• Change the color.
• Configure the time it takes until starship shows the time it took to run a command.
• Set the current path truncation.
• Show the time (disabled by default) with options to set the time format. You can enable 12 hour formatting, set the format, style, and UTC offset to use. The latter lets display with a timezone offset instead of your local timezone.
• Define the way the battery levels are shown. For example, you can set the threshold in displaying the battery indicator.
• Set how the Git branch, state and status are shown.
• Advanced configuration options include:
  • Custom pre-prompt and pre-execution commands in bash.
  • Change the window title.
  • Style strings.

Next page: Page 3 – Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary