Starship is a really nice, fast, customisable shell prompt - of which there are many - but Starship supports a very wide range of things out-of-the-box.
Including docker context’s. It detects Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml/yaml in the directory, and if you’re not on the default context then it’ll show the name of the context you’re on in blue alongside a little whale icon. A tiny but very useful feature.
Better late than never. The one thing I like about is customizability, speed and ability to look same for bash, zsh or fish.
Yeah, it’s really flexible and I like that I don’t need to change my shell to use it. I’ve been using a powerline equivalent for bash for a while, so thought I’d hate the default of having the info on a separate line (which is easy to change) but I really like it - everything I need to see is always visible.
Been using it for a while now, really amazing!
What is exactly a cross-shell prompt? Is it something like zsh vs bash, or am I mistaking it with something else?
It’s a prompt system that works on multiple different shells. So it doesn’t matter if you use bash, zsh, fish, etc. you can use it. A lot of the fancy prompt systems are shell-specific (e.g. Oh My Zsh) and a lot of people don’t want to change shells.
It basically enhances your prompt with a series of packages that detect things in your current directory and display data in the prompt. Things like git branch, node version, node package version, docker context, etc.
Ooh, that sounds amazing! Do you have any recommendation, aside from Starship?
I’m unfortunately working mostly on Windows (I work in gamedev, and the state of Linux support of major engines is… Questionable), but I’ve recently discovered so many QoL tools that has made me switch from WSL bash to simply using Powershell, and cross-shell prompt seems like one of the last features I’m missing (my dream is to replicate the Kali’s ZSH QoL features, but I never managed to get even close).
What was really gamechanger for me was the discovery of chocolatey, and more importantly gsudo package - being able to just sudo on windows instead of launching an admin shell and subsequent CDs, and also changing my terminal to Alacritty (I also tried Tabby, but it was too slow to start, but I’m open for terminal emulator recommendations). Is there anything else you’d recommend to include into this stack? But something like a cross-shell prompt does sounds amazing.
Oh never seen Alacritty before! Could you provide some info as to why you use that over windows terminal?
I used to do game dev as a hobby, but as you say Windows is just head-and-shoulders ahead of Linux for that - not just for the engine support, but all the essential tools that go along with it too.
Starship does work with Powershell - but I don’t have any other recommendations for Windows. I currently only use Windows for gaming, I use Linux for development and general use.
Dual boot for sanity! SSD’s prices are falling of a cliff right now.
