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Customize Your Shell Prompt with Starship

Your shell prompt is the thing you look at hundreds of times a day. The default prompt in most shells tells you almost nothing — no git branch, no command duration, no context. Starship fixes that: it’s a single, fast, cross-shell prompt written in Rust that works the same way in Bash, Zsh, Fish, PowerShell, and more.

This guide walks through installing Starship and setting up a config that shows your current directory, git status, and command execution time — without slowing your shell down.

Why Starship over the alternatives

Section titled “Why Starship over the alternatives”
  • Fast. It’s written in Rust and designed to render in single-digit milliseconds, so it won’t make your shell feel sluggish.
  • Cross-shell. One config file (~/.config/starship.toml) works whether you’re in Bash, Zsh, Fish, or even PowerShell — handy if you jump between machines and shells.
  • Modular. Every piece of information (“module”) — git branch, language version, battery level, command duration — can be turned on, off, or restyled independently.

Installation

Section titled “Installation”
Terminal window
brew install starship

Add it to your shell

Section titled “Add it to your shell”

  1. Open your shell’s config file.

    Terminal window
    echo 'eval "$(starship init bash)"' >> ~/.bashrc

  2. Restart your shell, or source the config file directly:

    Terminal window
    source ~/.zshrc

  3. You should immediately see the default Starship prompt, including your current directory and, if you’re in one, your git branch and status.

A solid starter config

Section titled “A solid starter config”

Create ~/.config/starship.toml with the following to get a clean prompt that shows your directory, git info, and how long the last command took (once it’s over 2 seconds — useful for spotting slow builds or scripts):

~/.config/starship.toml
format = """
$directory\
$git_branch\
$git_status\
$cmd_duration
$character"""


[directory]
truncation_length = 3
style = "bold cyan"


[git_branch]
symbol = " "
style = "bold purple"


[cmd_duration]
min_time = 2000
format = " took [$duration]($style)"


[character]
success_symbol = "[➜](bold green)"
error_symbol = "[➜](bold red)"

Save the file and open a new shell (or run source ~/.zshrc / source ~/.bashrc again) to see it take effect.

Pairing it with a good terminal emulator

Section titled “Pairing it with a good terminal emulator”

Starship looks best in a terminal that renders Nerd Font icons and true color cleanly. If your current terminal is struggling with glyphs or feels slow to redraw, it might be worth a change — see our terminal emulator roundup for a side-by-side comparison of the most popular options.

Further reading

Section titled “Further reading”