This past week I’ve spent some time sprucing up my terminal configuration. Here are the changes I’ve ended up making.

Starting Point

  • ZSH (with oh-my-zsh)
  • powerlevel10k theme
  • some very basic tmux usage

Out with powerlevel10k, in with Starship

I’d been using powerlevel10k for ages, it looked pretty and added useful information to my terminal prompt 👍. Unfortunately it’s no longer being worked on (👎) so a replacement was in order.

Enter Starship, a pretty popular alternative to powerlevel10k. It’s written in Rust (woo!?) and claims to be “blazingly fast”. Much more importantly the documentation is really good and it’s really easy to install.

Installing

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

Then to add it to zsh edit ~/.zshrc to contain,

ZSH_THEME=""

# put this near the end
eval "$(starship init zsh)"

And that’s it - there’s nothing more that you need to set up!

Extra Configuration

I’m generally enjoying the catpuccin colour schemes at the moment, and it turns out there an example configuratio (“preset”) that gives a powerline style prompt with the catpuccin colours. Again, setting this up is simple,

starship preset catppuccin-powerline -o ~/.config/starship.toml

This will give you something like this - very pleasant.

catpuccin powerline prompt

My only criticism is that the prompt uses quite a lot of horizontal space, and by default places the cursor on the same line. This leads to quite a cramped feeling when using the terminal, especially if you often have narrower windows, and means commands often wrap to a new line.

This can be easily fixed with a two line addition to ~/.config/starship.toml,

[line_break]
disabled = false

Now the cursor gets placed at the start of a new line which generally feels much better.

Quick Tip

Starship has a really good quality of life feature for new users in the form of the starship explain command. This breaks down your current prompt into segments and tells you what each one means.

terminal snippet

tmux

As mentioned I’ve been using tmux a little, mainly for leaving sessions running on my work machine after I’ve disconnected, or for using tmux windows to avoid the need to open multiple ssh connections to the same place. I knew there was more I could be getting out of it so I went looking for a helpful write-up.

I found a great blog article by Ham Vocke on making tmux more usable.

Some of the suggestions I’d already come across before (remapping prefix from C-b to C-a), but there were also new things I’ve now adopted.

  • Design tweaks for how tmux looks
    • I’m using these as given. They make tmux look generally less clunky
  • Switching panes with just Alt-arrow
    • I already had prefix-<arrow> set up to switch between panes based on some other tmux guide (so, C-a <left> for example). I wasn’t using panes a lot, and it felt “fine”
    • I’m really surprised at how much of difference dropping one key press to use Alt-<arrow> for pane switching has made. It feels so much faster, and I find I’m making more use of panes as a result

These fairly small quality of life improvements feel to me like they make a big difference to how natural it feels to use tmux.