Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

I like maximalist prompts, and indeed Starship is what Shell Bling Ubuntu [1] installs on a new dev machine. But they're not everyone's cup of tea.

If I wanted to recommend to someone the min-maxed, highest density thing they could add to their prompt, it would simply be the time your current prompt appeared + the amount of time the last command you ran took.

These two pieces of information together make it very easy for you (or your local sysadmin (or an LLM looking over your digital shoulder)) to piece together a log of exactly what happened when. This kind of psuedo-non-repudiation can be invaluable for debugging sessions when you least expect it.

This was a tip I distilled from Michael W. Lucas's Networking for System Administrators a few years ago, which remains my preferred recommendation for any developers looking to learn just enough about networking to not feel totally lost when talking to an actual network engineer.

Bonus nerd points if you measure time in seconds since the UNIX epoch. Very easy and fast to run time delta calculations if you do that:

    [0 1719242840] $ echo "foo"
    [0 1719242905] $ echo "fell asleep before hitting enter" && sleep 5
    [5 1719242910] $

[1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu

For personal workstation, the current directory is enough. Maybe I change the color based the status of the last command. That’s pretty much the only information I need before entering any command. Everything else can be accessed when I really need it.

You don't need to know what branch you're on before running commands? I cant tell you the number of times ive been on the wrong branch executing stuff.

I literally use just PS1='$ '.

`git status` to know git stuff. `pwd` for the current working directory, etc

I also don't use aliases like `gs` or `..`

One good thing about having a very minimal setup is that you feel at home anywhere.

It wasn't always like this. I used many, many prompts and shell tools over the decades. The only tool that stood the test of time is tmux.

See when I don't have a prompt I forget to run those things and just autopilot through a lot of commands before I realize Im on the wrong branch.

For example if I have say 3 worktrees open in 3 seperate tmux tabs and are context switching between them (very common when reviewing multiple PRs from my devs) Sometimes i will get the tabs mixed up, which worktree is where etc and just autopilot a bunch of commands meant for one tree into a different one and its quite annoying to clean up.

The prompt has generally stopped me from doing that.