Install Starship Shell Prompt for Bash / Zsh / Fish

I’m a big fan of fast shell prompts for “astronauts“. Starship is the minimal, blazing fast, and extremely customizable prompt for any shell!. It works for Bash, Zsh and Fish shells. The Starship shell prompt is designed to only show the information you need while you’re working, while staying sleek and out of the way.

I’ve used Pure and Spaceship before and this is the right time to give a different Prompt a try. We will see how to install Starship shell prompt on different Linux distributions and macOS.

Step 1: Install Powerline font / FiraCode font

A Powerline font is required. Install it with the commands:

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt update
sudo apt install fonts-powerline

# Fedora
sudo dnf install powerline-fonts

# Any other Linux
git clone https://github.com/powerline/fonts.git --depth=1
cd fonts
./install.sh
cd ..
rm -rf fonts

For FiraCode font, install via:

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install fonts-firacode

# Arch Linux / Manjaro
sudo pacman -S otf-fira-code

# Gentoo
emerge -av media-fonts/fira-code

# Fedora
dnf copr enable evana/fira-code-fonts
dnf install fira-code-fonts

Step 2: Installing Starship cross-shell prompt for astronauts

Use one of the methods shared here to install Starship cross-shell prompt for astronauts on your system.

Install from package manager:

# macOS
brew install starship

# Arch
yay -S starship

# Nix
nix-env --install starship

# Termux
pkg install starship

For Arch users, see how to use yay – Best AUR Helper for Arch Linux / Manjaro

Install from pre-compiled binary:

For other platforms, download precompiled binary and place it in your PATH.

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/starship/starship/releases/latest \
  | grep browser_download_url \
  | grep x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu \
  | cut -d '"' -f 4 \
  | wget -qi -

Extract downloaded Archive.

tar xvf starship-*.tar.gz

Move the starship binary to /usr/local/bin directory.

sudo mv starship /usr/local/bin/

Check version of starship installed.

$ starship --version
starship 1.4.2

Step 2: Configure Zsh / Bash / Fish Shell

Add the lines below to your shell configuration file.

# Bash
$ vim ~/.bashrc
eval "$(starship init bash)"

# Zsh
$ vim ~/.zshrc
eval "$(starship init zsh)"

# Fish
$ vim ~/.config/fish/config.fish
eval (starship init fish)

Source your shell configuration for the changes to update.

$ source ~/.zshrc

You have Starship prompt installed and working.