Installing starship cli tool on Ubuntu

Who doesn't like a little pizazz?

By John C. Zastrow

I’ve been enjoying using starship rs to enhance my terminal experience on Ubuntu. It’s a minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell. Written in Rust of course.

Process

  1. A Nerd Font installed and enabled in your terminal (love FiraCode Nerd Font). from this post ,
wget https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/releases/download/v3.4.0/FiraCode.zip
# Unzip the file downloaded
filename=FiraCode.zip
extension="${filename##*.}"
filename="${filename%.*}"
mkdir ${filename} && pushd ${filename}
unzip ../${filename}.${extension}
popd

# Moving to the correct location and update font cache
# Now, let's create a .fonts directory and move the new font there

mkdir -p ~/.fonts
mv ${filename} ~/.fonts/

# Last, but not least, we need to update Ubuntu's font cache

fc-cache -fv

Then check to see if they all landed well with fc-list :family | sort | uniq

  1. Then install starship with sudo curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sh to install starship. or just sudo apt install starship
  2. Add the following line to your shell’s configuration file to initialize Starship:
  3. eval "$(starship init bash)" for bash or eval "$(starship init zsh)" for zsh
  4. Restart your terminal or run source ~/.bashrc or source ~/.zshrc to apply the changes.

While I’m here, on Windows, stick the init thing for bash into a .profile file instead of .bashrc

  1. Configure Starship to your liking by creating a ~/.config/starship.toml file. You can find the configuration options in the Starship documentation.

    • mkdir -p ~/.config && touch ~/.config/starship.toml
    • then maybe apply some presets from here
    • Though on my most recent deployment, I opted for a more minimal setup because I like the CLI icon better