Advanced Configuration

While Starship is a versatile shell, sometimes you need to do more than edit starship.toml to get it to do certain things. This page details some of the more advanced configuration techniques used in starship.

::: warning

The configurations in this section are subject to change in future releases of Starship.

:::

TransientPrompt in PowerShell

It is possible to replace the previous-printed prompt with a custom string. This is useful in cases where all the prompt information is not always needed. To enable this, run Enable-TransientPrompt in the shell session. To make it permanent, put this statement in your $PROFILE. Transience can be disabled on-the-fly with Disable-TransientPrompt.

By default, the left side of input gets replaced with >. To customize this, define a new function called Invoke-Starship-TransientFunction. For example, to display Starship's character module here, you would do

function Invoke-Starship-TransientFunction {
  &starship module character
}

Invoke-Expression (&starship init powershell)

Enable-TransientPrompt

TransientPrompt and TransientRightPrompt in Cmd

Clink allows you to replace the previous-printed prompt with custom strings. This is useful in cases where all the prompt information is not always needed. To enable this, run clink set prompt.transient <value> where <value> can be one of:

• always: always replace the previous prompt
• same_dir: replace the previous prompt only if the working directory is same
• off: do not replace the prompt (i.e. turn off transience)

You need to do this only once. Make the following changes to your starship.lua to customize what gets displayed on the left and on the right:

• By default, the left side of input gets replaced with >. To customize this, define a new function called starship_transient_prompt_func. This function receives the current prompt as a string that you can utilize. For example, to display Starship's character module here, you would do

function starship_transient_prompt_func(prompt)
  return io.popen("starship module character"
    .." --keymap="..rl.getvariable('keymap')
  ):read("*a")
end
load(io.popen('starship init cmd'):read("*a"))()

• By default, the right side of input is empty. To customize this, define a new function called starship_transient_rprompt_func. This function receives the current prompt as a string that you can utilize. For example, to display the time at which the last command was started here, you would do

function starship_transient_rprompt_func(prompt)
  return io.popen("starship module time"):read("*a")
end
load(io.popen('starship init cmd'):read("*a"))()

TransientPrompt and TransientRightPrompt in Fish

It is possible to replace the previous-printed prompt with a custom string. This is useful in cases where all the prompt information is not always needed. To enable this, run enable_transience in the shell session. To make it permanent, put this statement in your ~/.config/fish/config.fish. Transience can be disabled on-the-fly with disable_transience.

Note that in case of Fish, the transient prompt is only printed if the commandline is non-empty, and syntactically correct.

• By default, the left side of input gets replaced with a bold-green ❯. To customize this, define a new function called starship_transient_prompt_func. For example, to display Starship's character module here, you would do

function starship_transient_prompt_func
  starship module character
end
starship init fish | source
enable_transience

• By default, the right side of input is empty. To customize this, define a new function called starship_transient_rprompt_func. For example, to display the time at which the last command was started here, you would do

function starship_transient_rprompt_func
  starship module time
end
starship init fish | source
enable_transience

Custom pre-prompt and pre-execution Commands in Cmd

Clink provides extremely flexible APIs to run pre-prompt and pre-exec commands in Cmd shell. It is fairly simple to use with Starship. Make the following changes to your starship.lua file as per your requirements:

• To run a custom function right before the prompt is drawn, define a new function called starship_preprompt_user_func. This function receives the current prompt as a string that you can utilize. For example, to draw a rocket before the prompt, you would do

function starship_preprompt_user_func(prompt)
  print("🚀")
end

load(io.popen('starship init cmd'):read("*a"))()

• To run a custom function right before a command is executed, define a new function called starship_precmd_user_func. This function receives the current commandline as a string that you can utilize. For example, to print the command that's about to be executed, you would do

function starship_precmd_user_func(line)
  print("Executing: "..line)
end

load(io.popen('starship init cmd'):read("*a"))()

Custom pre-prompt and pre-execution Commands in Bash

Bash does not have a formal preexec/precmd framework like most other shells. Because of this, it is difficult to provide fully customizable hooks in bash. However, Starship does give you limited ability to insert your own functions into the prompt-rendering procedure:

• To run a custom function right before the prompt is drawn, define a new function and then assign its name to starship_precmd_user_func. For example, to draw a rocket before the prompt, you would do

function blastoff(){
    echo "🚀"
}
starship_precmd_user_func="blastoff"

• To run a custom function right before a command runs, you can use the DEBUG trap mechanism. However, you must trap the DEBUG signal before initializing Starship! Starship can preserve the value of the DEBUG trap, but if the trap is overwritten after starship starts up, some functionality will break.

function blastoff(){
    echo "🚀"
}
trap blastoff DEBUG     # Trap DEBUG *before* running starship
set -o functrace
eval $(starship init bash)
set +o functrace

Custom pre-prompt and pre-execution Commands in PowerShell

PowerShell does not have a formal preexec/precmd framework like most other shells. Because of this, it is difficult to provide fully customizable hooks in powershell. However, Starship does give you limited ability to insert your own functions into the prompt-rendering procedure:

Create a function named Invoke-Starship-PreCommand

function Invoke-Starship-PreCommand {
    $host.ui.Write("🚀")
}

Change Window Title

Some shell prompts will automatically change the window title for you (e.g. to reflect your working directory). Fish even does it by default. Starship does not do this, but it's fairly straightforward to add this functionality to bash, zsh, cmd or powershell.

First, define a window title change function (identical in bash and zsh):

function set_win_title(){
    echo -ne "\033]0; YOUR_WINDOW_TITLE_HERE \007"
}

You can use variables to customize this title ($USER, $HOSTNAME, and $PWD are popular choices).

In bash, set this function to be the precmd starship function:

starship_precmd_user_func="set_win_title"

In zsh, add this to the precmd_functions array:

precmd_functions+=(set_win_title)

If you like the result, add these lines to your shell configuration file (~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc) to make it permanent.

For example, if you want to display your current directory in your terminal tab title, add the following snippet to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:

function set_win_title(){
    echo -ne "\033]0; $(basename "$PWD") \007"
}
starship_precmd_user_func="set_win_title"

For Cmd, you can change the window title using the starship_preprompt_user_func function.

function starship_preprompt_user_func(prompt)
  console.settitle(os.getenv('USERNAME').."@"..os.getenv('COMPUTERNAME')..": "..os.getcwd())
end

load(io.popen('starship init cmd'):read("*a"))()

You can also set a similar output with PowerShell by creating a function named Invoke-Starship-PreCommand.

# edit $PROFILE
function Invoke-Starship-PreCommand {
  $host.ui.Write("`e]0; PS> $env:USERNAME@$env:COMPUTERNAME`: $pwd `a")
}

Invoke-Expression (&starship init powershell)

Enable Right Prompt

Some shells support a right prompt which renders on the same line as the input. Starship can set the content of the right prompt using the right_format option. Any module that can be used in format is also supported in right_format. The $all variable will only contain modules not explicitly used in either format or right_format.

Note: The right prompt is a single line following the input location. To right align modules above the input line in a multi-line prompt, see the fill module.

right_format is currently supported for the following shells: elvish, fish, zsh, xonsh, cmd.

Example

# ~/.config/starship.toml

# A minimal left prompt
format = """$character"""

# move the rest of the prompt to the right
right_format = """$all"""

Produces a prompt like the following:

▶                                   starship on  rprompt [!] is 📦 v0.57.0 via 🦀 v1.54.0 took 17s

Continuation Prompt

Some shells support a continuation prompt along with the normal prompt. This prompt is rendered instead of the normal prompt when the user has entered an incomplete statement (such as a single left parenthesis or quote).

Starship can set the continuation prompt using the continuation_prompt option. The default prompt is "[∙](bright-black) ".

Note: continuation_prompt should be set to a literal string without any variables.

Note: Continuation prompts are only available in the following shells:

• bash
• zsh
• PowerShell

Example

# ~/.config/starship.toml

# A continuation prompt that displays two filled in arrows
continuation_prompt = "▶▶"

Style Strings

Style strings are a list of words, separated by whitespace. The words are not case sensitive (i.e. bold and BoLd are considered the same string). Each word can be one of the following:

• bold
• italic
• underline
• dimmed
• inverted
• blink
• hidden
• strikethrough
• bg:<color>
• fg:<color>
• <color>
• none

where <color> is a color specifier (discussed below). fg:<color> and <color> currently do the same thing, though this may change in the future. inverted swaps the background and foreground colors. The order of words in the string does not matter.

The none token overrides all other tokens in a string if it is not part of a bg: specifier, so that e.g. fg:red none fg:blue will still create a string with no styling. bg:none sets the background to the default color so fg:red bg:none is equivalent to red or fg:red and bg:green fg:red bg:none is also equivalent to fg:red or red. It may become an error to use none in conjunction with other tokens in the future.

A color specifier can be one of the following:

• One of the standard terminal colors: black, red, green, blue, yellow, purple, cyan, white. You can optionally prefix these with bright- to get the bright version (e.g. bright-white).
• A # followed by a six-digit hexadecimal number. This specifies an RGB color hex code.
• A number between 0-255. This specifies an 8-bit ANSI Color Code.

If multiple colors are specified for foreground/background, the last one in the string will take priority.

Not every style string will be displayed correctly by every terminal. In particular, the following known quirks exist:

• Many terminals disable support for blink by default
• hidden is not supported on iTerm.
• strikethrough is not supported by the default macOS Terminal.app