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Dotfiles

Starship prompt

Starship draws the prompt — the text before your cursor. One config, ~/.config/starship.toml, drives both bash and zsh, so the prompt looks the same in both.

┌──[~/projects/dotfiles] (main) *
└─$

The Starship prompt in a terminal

The layout is adapted from Kali Linux’s default zsh prompt.

What each part means

Section titled “What each part means”
Part Colour Notes
┌──[ ] └─ and the ( ) muted (very dark navy) a barely-there frame
hostname teal only over SSH — so you know you’re on another machine
path blue last 3 folders
branch yellow only inside a git repo
git status peach * modified, + staged, ? untracked, ! conflict, plus ahead/behind
$ blue / red turns red when the last command failed

There’s a blank line before each prompt so command output is easy to tell apart.

Colours

Section titled “Colours”

Colours come from a [palettes.lasik] palette that mirrors the Lasik VSCode theme. Change a hex value once and every part using it updates:

[palettes.lasik]
blue   = "#4daafc"   # paths, $
yellow = "#FFE2A3"   # branch
peach  = "#fab795"   # git status
red    = "#f85149"   # $ after an error
muted  = "#2A324B"   # frame

Installing

Section titled “Installing”

The installer installs starship if it’s missing: brew install starship on macOS, the official installer elsewhere. To do it by hand:

Terminal window
curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sh

Then activate it (the dotfiles already do this — only needed without them):

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

Edge cases

Section titled “Edge cases”
  • No starship (minimal server, install failed): bash uses its fallback prompt; zsh shows its plain default % prompt.
  • Icons show as boxes: the terminal font has no Nerd Font icons. This config uses plain characters, but other tools might not. The installer can install a Nerd Font for you — see kitty.
  • Installer needs root for starship. The official installer puts it in /usr/local/bin and may ask for your sudo password.
  • The muted frame is nearly invisible on light or high-contrast terminal themes — by design on dark themes, but change muted if you use a light one.
  • Homebrew installs: starship has to start after Homebrew’s PATH is set. That’s why its line is at the very end of .zshrc.
  • The username section exists in the config but isn’t in the prompt layout, so your username isn’t shown.