Better late than never. The one thing I like about is customizability, speed and ability to look same for bash, zsh or fish.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Yeah, it's really flexible and I like that I don't need to change my shell to use it. I've been using a powerline equivalent for bash for a while, so thought I'd hate the default of having the info on a separate line (which is easy to change) but I really like it - everything I need to see is always visible.
What is exactly a cross-shell prompt? Is it something like zsh vs bash, or am I mistaking it with something else?
It's a prompt system that works on multiple different shells. So it doesn't matter if you use bash, zsh, fish, etc. you can use it. A lot of the fancy prompt systems are shell-specific (e.g. Oh My Zsh) and a lot of people don't want to change shells.
It basically enhances your prompt with a series of packages that detect things in your current directory and display data in the prompt. Things like git branch, node version, node package version, docker context, etc.
Ooh, that sounds amazing! Do you have any recommendation, aside from Starship?
I'm unfortunately working mostly on Windows (I work in gamedev, and the state of Linux support of major engines is... Questionable), but I've recently discovered so many QoL tools that has made me switch from WSL bash to simply using Powershell, and cross-shell prompt seems like one of the last features I'm missing (my dream is to replicate the Kali's ZSH QoL features, but I never managed to get even close).
What was really gamechanger for me was the discovery of chocolatey, and more importantly gsudo package - being able to just sudo on windows instead of launching an admin shell and subsequent CDs, and also changing my terminal to Alacritty (I also tried Tabby, but it was too slow to start, but I'm open for terminal emulator recommendations). Is there anything else you'd recommend to include into this stack? But something like a cross-shell prompt does sounds amazing.
Oh never seen Alacritty before! Could you provide some info as to why you use that over windows terminal?
To be honest, I'm not really sure whether it has that many more features, since I'm terribly lazy at reading documentation and learning keybinds :D The main selling feature for me is that it looks good, starts pretty quickly, and that I can use Ctrl + Shift + C and Ctrl + Shift + V to copy and paste :D But it looks like it does have a pretty short set of a few features, of which I really don't understand much :D
But what I'm still looking for is something like tmux on Windows, so far every solution I found when I spend a few minutes looking was too convoluted to setup or use, so I gave up. Thankfully, I usually only need it when i SSH somewhere, and that's always a linux server.
I use alacritty because it's blazingly fast, super responsive for me. I use it on Linux though, never touched it on Windows.
I used to do game dev as a hobby, but as you say Windows is just head-and-shoulders ahead of Linux for that - not just for the engine support, but all the essential tools that go along with it too.
Starship does work with Powershell - but I don't have any other recommendations for Windows. I currently only use Windows for gaming, I use Linux for development and general use.
Dual boot for sanity! SSD's prices are falling of a cliff right now.
I actually do have dual boot on almost every computer I use now that I think about it, but I'm quite frankly too lazy for switching OSes and setting everything up twice :/ I usually have troubles with procrastination even when I don't have to reboot a computer to start working, so dualboot has proven to be infeasible solution for that :D Even having to boot into a VM for something can make me postpone doing it, but fortunately ever since I discovered multipass it's not such a problem anymore :D
Another issue is with our company being heavily into O365, with most of ways how to use alternative clients being disabled. For example, I was not able to get Teams and Outlook working on Fedora, since they dropped support for clients last time I checked, and you're left with a pretty annoying web app. Then there's also the fact that we're using Checkpoint for VPN, which I also didn't manage to get working on Linux. :/
It's a shame, though. I work part time as a pentester, and having to work from Windows host OS is so annoying, I'd switch to Linux anytime, if it weren't for the aforementioned problems.
Been using it for a while now, really amazing!