Comment by FrenchTouch42
2 days ago
Try https://starship.rs then. Starship gives you the same "drop in and go" experience but without the 200ms+ prompt lag. One curl -> one line in your rc file, works on zsh/bash/fish/whatever.
Configuration is straightforward and easy imo: https://starship.rs/config/
Give it a spin, I think you won't regret it.
I'm so glad I switched to fish, I'd rather have genuinely good settings out of the box rather than endless configuration, and honestly it's much better out of the box than any configuration I've ever had.
Only drawback is that it's not POSIX, no issue for me, but maybe for people who have a lot of muscle memory with bash.
I tried fish for a while but as someone who heavily used bash before I couldn't get used to the new language. I also didn't feel they the language was much better than bash, at least for my usage. But I loved the default automatic coloring of arguments, underlining of files, etc.
Later I found fizsh, which I love and still use as default shell now. It's basically a configuration around zsh adding the colors, completions, and other good stuff inspired by fish to zsh. Can really recommend it for those who are used to zsh or bash but want their CLI to be more readable. Colors especially help with big command line arguments to show where they start and end, and keeping track of complex stuff like loops and conditional logic in your commands.
fizsh sounds really cool, but the last commit was 7+ years ago. do you run into any issues? https://github.com/zsh-users/fizsh
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For POSIX: I leave Bash as the system shell and then shim into Fish only for interactive terminals. This works surprisingly well, and any POSIX env initialisation will be inherited. I very rarely need to do something complicated enough in the REPL of the terminal and can start a subshell if needed.
Fish is nicer to script in by far, and you can keep those isolated with shebang lines and still run Bash scripts (with a proper shebang line). The only thing that’s tricky is `source` and equivalents, but I don’t think I’ve ever needed this in my main shell and not a throw-away sub shell.
I often write multi-line commands in my zsh shell, like while-loops. The nice thing is that I can readily put them in a script if needed.
I guess that somewhat breaks with fish: either you use bash -c '...' from the start, or you adopt the fish syntax, which means you need to convert again when you switch to a (bash) script.
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Fish is just excellent out of the box. It's a little tragic how path dependent we are on flawed terminal experiences designed 40 years ago.
After 10 years on zsh I finally switched 6 months ago and I haven't looked back. If I need POSIX, I'll just run scripts with the right shebang or pipe it to sh.
I've been using fish for nearly 10 years.
First, there are some ways to make fish more compatible with bash.
If you want to do some shell scripting in fish, or running other people's shell scripts (or commands) this may aid you since you wouldn't have to port them (or take less time to port them over).
You can achieve this with a plugin system such as 'oh my fish' or 'fisher'. But, as always, it adds complexity (and bloat :P), you'll need it on every fish shell (including remote systems), etc.
It is a bit akin to having nvim with plugins versus being able to use vi. Sometimes, you're going to need to be able to use the latter.
Also, to people who recently adopted fish: fish has been made more and more compatible with bash throughout those years.
FWIW, I use fish with starship these days.
./script.sh
and script.sh just starts with #/bin/bash
I'm simple
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When I'm in fish and I want to run a bash script I just... call it with bash :-)
It’s only takes a second to run a child bash shell when you need something posix
I have been using fish for 10 years now as my main shell and it is just perfect.
I'm surprised Starship is so popular. It's missing really basic powerlevel10k features like empty segments. If you look at some examples:
https://starship.rs/presets/gruvbox-rainbow
You can see that when the segments are empty, they still appear as a 1-width segment, rather than entirely disappearing.
It also makes you configure many things by hand. powerlevel10k has an interactive wizard that lets you design your prompt one option at a time (do you want a nerd font? do you want it one line or two? etc) but Starship makes you manually write escape codes if your preferences don't match one of the presets.
No judgment, but I do wonder what people like about Starship that makes up for these things.
Starship allows empty segments, I in this specific case it's just how the preset/theme works as it uses the Unicode character as separator and it needs to set the background and foreground colors depending on which modules is surrounded by
Every preset with powerlevel10k-style segments don't support hiding empty segments. Look at Pastel Powerline, Tokyo Night, Gruvbox Rainbow, Catppucin Powerline...
https://starship.rs/presets/#pastel-powerline
I tried making my own and the config TOML syntax isn't expressive enough to support hiding empty segments.
You're right that it's the thing with the Unicode character as separator, which all the alternatives handle just fine: powerlevel10k, tide, oh-my-posh... it's just everyone seems to love Starship, and that's what confuses me.
Just tried Starship, even though it wasn't the first time I'd heard about it. I would not say it is a 'drop-in and go' experience. Let me explain.
After installing and adding it to my bashrc, I was wondering was those version numbers and cloud symbols meant. Turns out: Since NodeJS and Python were installed, it found a good idea to print the respective versions. I could not care less about those versions. The other part was that it thought that I would like to see my AWS region. Well, I mean, I have built something with AWS a few years back, and the config file for that still exists, but no, I don't want to see that region every time I open a shell. Finally, the default is to have the prompt in a new line. I think when you have a long prompt that makes sense, and it might also be a taste thing. However, the documentation has this example at the beginning about newlines:
So I thought `add_newline = false` should do the trick, but it didn't.
Luckily, the AI (GPT-5.2) was pretty good at explaining and giving instructions for changing things. So after 30 minutes, everything was understood and configured to my liking. I like the result, but the default was pretty weird.
I tried using Starship, and it’s clearly faster than Oh My Zsh, but my issue was that I relied on some useful Oh My Zsh features that I didn’t know how to replicate in Starship. One of these is history filtering - for example, when I type source and press the up arrow, I only see previously run source commands, which makes it easy to find what I’m looking for. I tried to get this working in Starship, but had no luck.
I haven't checked out starship yet, but if I understand what you are using, that is Zle functionality. It's part of OMZs configuration (here: https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/blob/master/lib/key-bindi...) but doesn't use other OMZ features.
I don't know if starship is still using Zle. If so, this should be possible to configure without OMZ.
Control r. This is a zsh feature not a starship/oh my zsh feature
I think that's just a standard readline functionality. It's available on bash, out of the box.
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Ob Linux it's actually handled by inputrc
mirzap was probably using some omz plugin to do that, so if starship fully replaced omz, that functionality went away, too.
I have never used Oh My Zsh, but I use Atuin to do this and it works excellently at that. You can even make it filter by what folder you're in and whether you want to search only this session or host (you can sync shell history across hosts). It never occurred to me that this is something I'd want from a shell prompt, which is what Starship is.
check atuin for history search
From what I can tell, this doesn't nearly fill the gap that OMZ occupies
Nice history, command auto complete, and similar beyond just the looks, out of the box
Oh my zsh makes installing extension so easy, just edit .zshrc and add extract, fzf, z, etc. To the list of plugins
What? You still have to install the binary via your package manager. Most OMZ plugins are basically a bunch of shell completions or aliases.
I'll second this. I've had a really pleasant experience using Starship across development environments.
starship is great. I use it with a powerlevel10k fallback in my dotfiles for systems, starship is not installed yet to not break the shell entirely.
Starship is a single binary, pretty easy to carry around even the first time you ssh somewhere.
I'm totally aware... However p10k is the thing I used before so fallback was a low hanging fruit.
Never heard of this, looks pretty good. Are there any community themes based on starship like powerlevel9k/10k?
It requires a nerd font.