What it is
Starship draws the prompt your shell shows before each command. It works with Bash, Zsh, Fish and others, and shows context as you need it: the current directory, the Git branch and whether you have uncommitted changes, the language version in a project, and more. It’s configured in one TOML file.
Why it’s here
- Useful at a glance. You see where you are and the state of your repository before you type.
- Quick. It’s a single compiled program, so the prompt appears without delay.
- Easy to change. One file,
~/.config/starship.toml, controls every part of it.
On CoreDesktop
Starship is installed from pacman and turned on for Bash by CoreDesktop’s shell setup. CoreDesktop’s own config shows the machine’s hostname (always, not only over SSH), the full directory path, the Git branch and status, all in cyan, followed by a ❯ that turns into ✗ when the last command failed.
To use your own prompt instead, create ~/.config/starship.toml: when that file exists, CoreDesktop’s config is skipped. update keeps Starship current with the pacman packages.