My most recent adventure: Customizing my terminal prompt using Starship!

ernie · March 7, 2025, 7:32am

I read an item in today’s (March 6, 2025) ZDNet newsletter titled “Why the Starship prompt is better than your default on Linux and MacOS”. I was intrigued, so I followed the author’s instructions, and installed starship on my Garuda GNU/Linux system.

Interestingly, my prompt did not change following installation and activation of starship, so I asked if Garuda uses starship to customize the terminal prompt in Firefox (I think Firefox uses the Google search engine), and the AI responded yes, explaining the advantages of starship (blatant advertising), so I suspect that starship was already installed on my system.

I proceeded to customize my prompt to suit my preferences, using the starship configuration documentation. It now looks like this:
Colorized prompt

Note 1:
I couldn’t figure out how to capture a colorized screenshot of my terminal window, so I built this image using KDE’s character map app (KCharSelect) and kolourpaint.

Note 2:
It took me some time and a lot of experimentation to figure out where/how to use the commands I was learning about.

Note 3:
The bottom line (below the clock icon and time) is green with a double right arrow character when the command was successful, and red with an x character when it failed.

Note 4:
While reading the starship configuration documentation, I noticed that PowerShell is supported, so I switched to my Windows 11 system and followed the installation steps itemized on the main page of the starship website to install and activate it.

Next, I tracked down the two commands I needed to execute in PowerShell to create the starship.toml file in the .config folder in Windows, namely:

New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force ~/.config
New-Item -ItemType file ~/.config/starship.toml

Next, I switched back to my Garuda system and copied my starship.toml configuration file to my data partition (formatted as NTFS for Windows) so I could get to it there. You could also copy it to a USB flash drive if you PowerShell in Windows.

I then returned to Windows and copied the content of starship.toml in my data partition to the empty starship.toml file in the recently created .config folder at C:\Users\e-wil\.config on my system (replace e-wil with your user name on your system). Now my PowerShell prompt in Windows 11 looks exactly like the prompt in my Konsole terminal on Garuda KDE-Lite!

I hope you like my prompt. Maybe you can try out starship and customize your own prompt, and show it here too,

Ernie

callpaul.eu · March 7, 2025, 9:18am

Is that the enterprise version spock ?

Gary · March 7, 2025, 11:11am

I customized and it affected air traffic control in my area.
The neighbors weren’t very happy.

nevj · March 7, 2025, 12:07pm

That is easy
Use the screenshot app.
Choose Select Area
Outline the area with mouse and 1st button
Save the shot as an image… it will go in -/Pictures

Then you can upload that image file to itsfoss.

ernie · March 7, 2025, 3:25pm

I was able to take a screenshot, but it came out in shades of grey (no colors). I wasn’t satisfied with that, so I built the image you see in my original post. Did you mean that there’s a screenshot app I can install? if so, I’ll look for it in Garuda’s repositories, and install it if it isn’t already. Having such an app would have saved me some bother yesterday

UPDATE
I did some research and found Spectacle, a screenshot utility for KDE. It works great. I opened my Konsole terminal app, started spectacle, and a new window popped up with a full-screen image. I chose Active Window on the selection bar (right), and the image switched to my terminal window. I saved it to my ~/Pictures/Screenshots directory, and this is what I got:

Now everyone can see my new prompt exactly as it is!

Ernie

Gary · March 7, 2025, 3:58pm

Hi Ernie
My Garuda Xfce as a VM includes the basic screenshot tool.
Your DE may be different.

Manuel_Jordan · March 7, 2025, 4:08pm

Congrats

I knew starship indirectly due my learning process about zsh and oh my zsh

For many tutorials about the two latest mentioned is covered with powerlevel10k which it is the continuation of powerlevel9k and now starship replacement powerlevel10k.

The environment is pretty nice

nevj · March 7, 2025, 5:47pm

Yes, there is a screenshot app,
In MX with Xfce it is called screenshot
In other DE’s it may have another name.
Search your repo for screenshot… it should find at least one app.

Your grey may be because you used a non-color image type. I use .png for screenshots… it supports color

ernie · March 7, 2025, 6:12pm

True, In KDE it’s named Spectacle. I’ve installed the app, and now I get excellent screenshots! You can see my full Konsole terminal window in my previous post (post number 5).

Ernie

Akatama · March 19, 2025, 3:19am

Hey Ernie,
I was actually thinking about posting my own journey with Starship, but you beat me to it!

Here is what my prompt looks like:

It has support for icons for some file paths, for example, here is what downloads looks like:

Finally, this is what is looks like if somehow most of these fields were being used at once. Also note that it truncates the path if it is too long:

This is using a modified version of the Pastel Powerline preset for Starship. Primarily, I changed the colors, removed some modules I didn’t need, added some new ones I wanted and rearranged them a bit. It was a lot of fun and I really like how it looks

ernie · March 19, 2025, 4:01am

Wow! Your prompt looks really cool! At 75, it’s not my cup-o-tea, but I can still appreciate it’s beauty.

Ernie

ihasama · March 19, 2025, 11:11am

I’m using alacritty as terminal emulator and added the lines you see in the picture to my bashrc