alt Hacker NewsTry 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.
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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.
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:
# Inserts a blank line between shell prompts
add_newline = true
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.
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
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.
Never heard of this, looks pretty good. Are there any community themes based on starship like powerlevel9k/10k?
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.