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

(starship.rs)
457 points benoitg | 4 comments | 24 Jun 25 11:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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m000 ◴[24 Jun 25 16:10 UTC] No.44367731[source]▶
I would be very curious to see an age demographic chart of people using e.g. Starship.

Personally, over time, I have stopped caring too much about prompt customization. I concluded that, no matter how carefully you curate your prompt, 90% of the information shown will be irrelevant 90% of the time*. After a while, your brain will start perceiving this as visual clutter and filter it out, to the point you may even forget the information is there, right in front of your eyes.

And for the things that matter, you probably need more details than any prompt can show you. E.g. are there changes in your git branch? Ok there are, good to know, but which files have changed? Just knowing that there are changes is not really actionable information. You need to run additional commands to get actionable details.

* the numbers are completely arbitrary, but you get the picture

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1. rcarmo ◴[24 Jun 25 17:53 UTC] No.44368864[source]▶
I’m “very senior” (as in decades of _Unix_ use senior) and I like it in minimal mode because it’s just so much less hassle than all the other zsh stuff I had been using for a couple of decades. Not sure if you expected replies to be full of all the JavaScript kids that use emojis in logging messages, but apologies if so :)
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2. m000 ◴[24 Jun 25 18:42 UTC] No.44369400[source]▶
It's always nice to have an impromptu HN poll. We may have been missing and didn't know :)

And now that you mention it, next year will be my 30th Unix-versary. Time flies... Still not a greybeard though.

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3. dmd ◴[24 Jun 25 23:50 UTC] No.44372289[source]▶
Same here. I’ve been using Unix of some flavor or another since 1989 and generally prefer minimalism and simplicity - but I also prefer “opinionated good defaults”, and starship gives me that. (I’ve even switched to Fish, because it does well with no config absolutely basic table stakes stuff OOTB that bash/zsh need a ton of garbage for.)
4. _kb ◴[25 Jun 25 00:24 UTC] No.44372493[source]▶
30 is not that long in Unix time. Or did you mean your 946708560th?