Frequently Asked Questions

What is the configuration used in the demo GIF?

• Terminal Emulator: iTerm2
  • Theme: Minimal
  • Color Scheme: Snazzy
  • Font: FiraCode Nerd Font
• Shell: Fish Shell
  • Configuration: matchai's Dotfiles
  • Prompt: Starship

How do I get command completion as shown in the demo GIF?

Completion support, or autocomplete, is provided by your shell of choice. In the case of the demo, the demo was done with Fish Shell, which provides completions by default. If you use Z Shell (zsh), I'd suggest taking a look at zsh-autosuggestions.

Do top level format and <module>.disabled do the same thing?

Yes, they can both be used to disable modules in the prompt. If all you plan to do is disable modules, <module>.disabled is the preferred way to do so for these reasons:

• Disabling modules is more explicit than omitting them from the top level format
• Newly created modules will be added to the prompt as Starship is updated

The docs say Starship is cross-shell. Why isn't my preferred shell supported?

The way Starship is built, it should be possible to add support for virtually any shell. The starship binary is stateless and shell agnostic, so as long as your shell supports prompt customization and shell expansion, Starship can be used.

Here's a small example getting Starship working with bash:

# Get the status code from the last command executed
STATUS=$?

# Get the number of jobs running.
NUM_JOBS=$(jobs -p | wc -l)

# Set the prompt to the output of `starship prompt`
PS1="$(starship prompt --status=$STATUS --jobs=$NUM_JOBS)"

The Bash implementation built into Starship is slightly more complex to allow for advanced features like the Command Duration module and to ensure that Starship is compatible with pre-installed Bash configurations.

For a list of all flags accepted by starship prompt, use the following command:

starship prompt --help

The prompt will use as much context as is provided, but no flags are "required".

How do I run Starship on Linux distributions with older versions of glibc?

If you get an error like "version 'GLIBC_2.18' not found (required by starship)" when using the prebuilt binary (for example, on CentOS 6 or 7), you can use a binary compiled with musl instead of glibc:

curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sh -s -- --platform unknown-linux-musl

Why do I see Executing command "..." timed out. warnings?

Starship executes different commands to get information to display in the prompt, for example the version of a program or the current git status. To make sure starship doesn't hang while trying to execute these commands we set a time limit, if a command takes longer than this limit starship will stop the execution of the command and output the above warning, this is expected behaviour. This time limit is configurable using the command_timeoutkey so if you want you can increase the time limit. You can also follow the debugging steps below to see which command is being slow and see if you can optimise it. Finally you can set the STARSHIP_LOG env var to error to hide these warnings.

I see symbols I don't understand or expect, what do they mean?

If you see symbols that you don't recognise you can use starship explain to explain the currently showing modules.

Starship is doing something unexpected, how can I debug it?

You can enable the debug logs by using the STARSHIP_LOG env var. These logs can be very verbose so it is often useful to use the module command if you are trying to debug a particular module, for example, if you are trying to debug the rust module you could run the following command to get the trace logs and output from the module.

env STARSHIP_LOG=trace starship module rust

If starship is being slow you can try using the timings command to see if there is a particular module or command that is to blame.

env STARSHIP_LOG=trace starship timings

This will output the trace log and a breakdown of all modules that either took more than 1ms to execute or produced some output.

Finally if you find a bug you can use the bug-report command to create a GitHub issue.

starship bug-report

Why don't I see a glyph symbol in my prompt?

The most common cause of this is system misconfiguration. Some Linux distros in particular do not come with font support out-of-the-box. You need to ensure that:

• Your locale is set to a UTF-8 value, like de_DE.UTF-8 or ja_JP.UTF-8. If LC_ALL is not a UTF-8 value, you will need to change it.
• You have an emoji font installed. Most systems come with an emoji font by default, but some (notably Arch Linux) do not. You can usually install one through your system's package manager--noto emoji is a popular choice.
• You are using a Nerd Font.

To test your system, run the following commands in a terminal:

echo -e "\xf0\x9f\x90\x8d"
echo -e "\xee\x82\xa0"

The first line should produce a snake emoji, while the second should produce a powerline branch symbol (e0a0).

If either symbol fails to display correctly, your system is still misconfigured. Unfortunately, getting font configuration correct is sometimes difficult. Users on the Discord may be able to help. If both symbols display correctly, but you still don't see them in starship, file a bug report!

How do I uninstall Starship?

Starship is just as easy to uninstall as it is to install in the first place.

1. Remove any lines in your shell config (e.g. ~/.bashrc) used to initialize Starship.
2. Delete the Starship binary.

If Starship was installed using a package manager, please refer to their docs for uninstallation instructions.

If Starship was installed using the install script, the following command will delete the binary:

# Locate and delete the starship binary
sh -c 'rm "$(command -v 'starship')"'

How do I install Starship without sudo?

The shell install script (https://starship.rs/install.sh) only attempts to use sudo if the target installation directory is not writable by the current user. The default installation diretory is the value of the $BIN_DIR environment variable or /usr/local/bin if $BIN_DIR is not set. If you instead set the installation directory to one that is writable by your user, you should be able to install starship without sudo. For example, curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sh -s -- -b ~/.local/bin uses the -b command line option of the install script to set the installation directory to ~/.local/bin.

For a non-interactive installation of Starship, don't forget to add the -y option to skip the confirmation. Check the source of the installation script for a list of all supported installation options.

When using a package manager, see the documentation for your package manager about installing with or without sudo.