A robbyrussell-like prompt for starship

Oh My Zsh was the first framework I went into for customizing my prompt, and customizing my terminal experience in general. It was fun to try out all sorts of themes along with the various plugins available. Exposure to them really opened my eyes to what you can do with your typical terminal tools. Specifically the git integration in the default configuration was a game changer, and the colored-man-pages plugin where you can color man pages.

A couple of years after that, I discovered starship, a cross-shell prompt. Intrigued by the flexible control in customizing the prompt, and the added bonus of having the same prompt in bash, I wanted to switch to it, but I didn't like the default prompt. It felt too distracting compared to the default robbyrussell theme I was using in Oh My Zsh, so I stopped playing around with starship.

Eventually I revisited starship, and saw that they added configuration presets. In particular I liked how small the pure preset config was. That reinvigorated my interest in making a starship config just for myself, and I figured that I should try to emulate the robbyrussell theme as close as I could.

Here is what I ended up with. Place the following into your starship.toml configuration.

# $HOME/.config/starship.toml
# Robby Russell like theme from omz

format = """
$character\
$directory\
$git_branch\
$git_status"""

add_newline = false

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

[directory]
truncation_length = 1
read_only = ' 🔒'

[git_branch]
symbol = 'git'
format = '[$symbol:\([$branch](bold red)\)](bold blue) '

[git_status]
style = "bold yellow"

And here's what it looks like:

It's not exactly like the robbyrussell prompt (notice the different git status indicator), but the config is a good starting point for adding or removing any features.

In general, a benefit of using starship is the amazing flexible control over your prompt with just a toml file, rather than trying to learn zsh syntax. For example, if I didn't like that the robbyrussell theme didn't show any parent directories, I could easily change the truncation_length for the directory module to a value greater than 1, rather than having to work with zsh code. I could add user@hostname to the prompt only when I'm in an ssh session, add an indicator when I'm in a read only directory, and much more.