this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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What is exactly a cross-shell prompt? Is it something like zsh vs bash, or am I mistaking it with something else?
It's a prompt system that works on multiple different shells. So it doesn't matter if you use bash, zsh, fish, etc. you can use it. A lot of the fancy prompt systems are shell-specific (e.g. Oh My Zsh) and a lot of people don't want to change shells.
It basically enhances your prompt with a series of packages that detect things in your current directory and display data in the prompt. Things like git branch, node version, node package version, docker context, etc.
Ooh, that sounds amazing! Do you have any recommendation, aside from Starship?
I'm unfortunately working mostly on Windows (I work in gamedev, and the state of Linux support of major engines is... Questionable), but I've recently discovered so many QoL tools that has made me switch from WSL bash to simply using Powershell, and cross-shell prompt seems like one of the last features I'm missing (my dream is to replicate the Kali's ZSH QoL features, but I never managed to get even close).
What was really gamechanger for me was the discovery of chocolatey, and more importantly gsudo package - being able to just sudo on windows instead of launching an admin shell and subsequent CDs, and also changing my terminal to Alacritty (I also tried Tabby, but it was too slow to start, but I'm open for terminal emulator recommendations). Is there anything else you'd recommend to include into this stack? But something like a cross-shell prompt does sounds amazing.
Oh never seen Alacritty before! Could you provide some info as to why you use that over windows terminal?
I use alacritty because it's blazingly fast, super responsive for me. I use it on Linux though, never touched it on Windows.
To be honest, I'm not really sure whether it has that many more features, since I'm terribly lazy at reading documentation and learning keybinds :D The main selling feature for me is that it looks good, starts pretty quickly, and that I can use Ctrl + Shift + C and Ctrl + Shift + V to copy and paste :D But it looks like it does have a pretty short set of a few features, of which I really don't understand much :D
But what I'm still looking for is something like tmux on Windows, so far every solution I found when I spend a few minutes looking was too convoluted to setup or use, so I gave up. Thankfully, I usually only need it when i SSH somewhere, and that's always a linux server.