starshell

A minimal, fast shell prompt with a fixed, hand-picked set of modules, built for Linux only.

This is a fork of Starship. starshell is a standalone fork with its own version history — it is not mechanically synced with upstream Starship releases. Upstream is consulted only as a manual reference when a change is worth porting into the core engine or into a module this project still ships. Most of Starship's modules have been intentionally removed; only twelve remain.

All credit for the original design, engine, and module implementations goes to the Starship contributors. starshell is distributed under the same ISC License as upstream.

Why fork?

Starship supports dozens of modules covering nearly every language toolchain and cloud provider. starshell strips that down to a fixed set of modules relevant to a single Linux-only workflow, in exchange for a smaller binary, a simpler codebase, and no cross-platform code paths to maintain.

Modules

starshell ships exactly twelve modules — nothing else:

Module	Purpose
username	Displays the active user's name.
directory	Displays the current working directory, with truncation and path substitution.
git_branch	Displays the active git branch.
git_commit	Displays the active commit hash / tag.
git_state	Displays the current git operation in progress (rebase, merge, etc.).
git_status	Displays working-tree status counts (staged, modified, untracked, ahead/behind).
time	Displays the current local time in a configurable format.
character	Displays the prompt character/arrow, styled by last command success/failure.
os	Displays an icon (and optionally name/version) for the detected OS/distro. Disabled by default.
python	Displays the active Python version / virtualenv name.
line_break	Inserts a line break in multi-line prompt formats.
custom	Runs a user-defined shell command and displays its output as a segment.

No other modules exist in this codebase — there's nothing to disable, since unsupported modules were removed entirely rather than gated off.

Installation

Prebuilt binary

curl -L https://github.com/AswinGopal/starshell/releases/latest/download/starshell -o starshell
chmod +x starshell
sudo mv starshell /usr/local/bin/

Prebuilt binaries are Linux-only (x86_64, built on ubuntu-latest) and are attached to each GitHub Release.

Build from source

cargo build --release

The compiled binary will be at target/release/starshell.

Usage

Add the following to your shell's config file to enable starshell, replacing bash with the name of your shell:

eval "$(starshell init bash)"

Supported shells: bash, zsh, fish, elvish, nushell, tcsh, xonsh, powershell, ion.

Configuration

starshell reads its configuration from starship.toml, located via the STARSHIP_CONFIG environment variable or the platform default config path — the same convention used by upstream Starship, for drop-in compatibility with existing configs.

starshell config

opens the config file in $EDITOR.

License

ISC — same as upstream Starship.