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fish shell VS Starship (Shell Prompt)

Compare fish shell VS Starship (Shell Prompt) and see what are their differences

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fish shell logo fish shell

The friendly interactive shell.

Starship (Shell Prompt) logo Starship (Shell Prompt)

Starship is the minimal, blazing fast, and extremely customizable prompt for any shell! Shows the information you need, while staying sleek and minimal. Quick installation available for Bash, Fish, ZSH, Ion, and Powershell.
  • fish shell Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-23
  • Starship (Shell Prompt) Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-02-21

fish shell features and specs

  • User-Friendly Syntax
    Fish shell features a more readable and user-friendly syntax compared to traditional shells like Bash or Zsh, making it easier for new users to learn and use.
  • Modern Features
    Fish shell includes out-of-the-box support for modern shell features such as syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, and smart command-line completions, greatly enhancing the user experience.
  • Web-Based Configuration
    Users can configure Fish shell through a web interface, making it more accessible and easier to customize compared to other shells that require manual configuration file edits.
  • Consistent Scripting
    Fish shell uses a consistent scripting language, which reduces the quirks and peculiarities often found in other shell scripting languages.

Possible disadvantages of fish shell

  • Compatibility Issues
    Fish shell is not POSIX compliant, which means scripts written in Fish will not be compatible with other POSIX-compliant shells like Bash or Zsh, potentially causing issues in environments that rely on such standards.
  • Smaller Ecosystem
    Compared to shells like Bash and Zsh, Fish has a smaller ecosystem of plugins, themes, and community support, which could limit available resources and tools.
  • Learning Curve for Experienced Users
    Experienced users of traditional shells like Bash or Zsh might find Fish's different syntax and features take some time to adapt to, potentially reducing initial productivity.
  • Limited Script Portability
    Scripts written in Fish shell are often not portable to other shell environments without significant modification, reducing their usability in multi-shell setups.

Starship (Shell Prompt) features and specs

  • Customization
    Starship is highly customizable, allowing users to tailor the prompt to their needs and preferences.
  • Speed
    Starship is designed to be fast and responsive, minimizing any delay in displaying the prompt.
  • Cross-Shell Compatibility
    Starship works with multiple shell environments like Bash, Zsh, Fish, and others, making it versatile and adaptable.
  • Feature-Rich
    It supports a wide array of features including displaying Git information, current directory, user info, and more.
  • Community Support
    Starship has an active community and regular updates, ensuring continued development and support.

Possible disadvantages of Starship (Shell Prompt)

  • Complex Configuration
    The high level of customization can lead to complex configuration files, which might be daunting for new users.
  • Dependency Overhead
    Starship has several dependencies that need to be installed, which can be a hurdle for some users.
  • Resource Usage
    Although optimized for speed, the additional features and functionalities can result in higher resource usage compared to simpler prompts.
  • Initial Learning Curve
    New users might find the initial setup and configuration process challenging, especially if they are not familiar with shell scripting.

fish shell videos

+ Add

this tank is not overstocked | Fish Tank Review Ep. 1

More videos:

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  • Review - Ryan's First Time Catching Fish for Dinner!!!

Starship (Shell Prompt) videos

No Starship (Shell Prompt) videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to fish shell and Starship (Shell Prompt))

fish shell

Starship (Shell Prompt)

Cryptocurrencies
69 69%
Cryptocurrencies
31% 31
Developer Tools
50 50%
Developer Tools
50% 50
Blockchain
100 100%
Blockchain
0% 0
Programming
38 38%
Programming
62% 62

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Starship (Shell Prompt) might be a bit more popular than fish shell. We know about 192 links to it since March 2021 and only 134 links to fish shell. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

fish shell mentions (134)

  • A short tutorial on using fish shell.
    Follow this to install. Note that this tutorial assume that you are on Linux. - Source: dev.to / 8 days ago
  • Tools for 2025
    I've probably been using fish shell [0] for close to 10 years now. When I need POSIX compliance or if I need to run a one-off bash command, I just call bash. It's exceedingly rare. Browsing through the documentation for Oils, it seems to be organized in a way that's very confusing. When you open the fish shell website it was two clear buttons for Tutorial and Documentation. [0] https://fishshell.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • TIL: Ghostty — a new and quite promising terminal emulator
    I remember that Julia Evans, whose blog I follow, mentioned a few time that she uses Fish. Also, some days ago I came across this post about Fish rewrite to Rust from C++, which sounds like a cool thing to do. However, I tried it some time ago, and while pretty neat, I wasn't convinced to switch to it completely. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Easy development environments with Nix and Nix flakes!
    The default shell in the above flake adds Valkey, NodeJS 22, the PNPM package manager, and the fish shell to the environment. It also starts Valkey in the background through a shell hook, passing it a custom config (declared via Nix!) and runs fish so we're dropped in the fish shell instead of our login shell. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • A new shell for using modern Unix commands
    I’m testing a new shell called fish, and I’m enjoying some features that truly make it a friendly interactive shell. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
View more

Starship (Shell Prompt) mentions (192)

  • Spice up Your Terminal With a Todo Reminder Using Starship Prompt and iZiDo Bash Script
    This tutorial demonstrates how to integrate a todo reminder into your terminal prompt using the Starship prompt and a Bash script named iZiDo. The setup allows you to manage and display your tasks directly within your terminal. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Day003 - Random posts under TIL
    5. Starship Starship written in rust is the minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell! You can download from here. The video by Andrew gives a detailed explanation on configuring the starship. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Let's release Rust-based fish
    The speed impact is one reason I've never liked oh-my-zsh and similar for other shells. It's also why I love starship https://starship.rs/. Lots of plug-ins to customise what I want at the prompt, and all of it native compiled such that it executes in milliseconds. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • Finding Terminal Utopia
    Thankfully, I found Starship, a super fast, super configurable prompt written in Rust. It works with most shells, on most operating systems. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • Zshell
    Source /usr/share/oh-my-zsh/lib/key-bindings.zsh [1]: https://starship.rs/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing fish shell and Starship (Shell Prompt), you can also consider the following products

zsh - The Z shell (Zsh) is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a powerful command interpreter for shell scripting.

Oh My Zsh - A delightful community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration.

GNU Bourne Again SHell - Bash is the shell, or command language interpreter, that will appear in the GNU operating system.

Bat - A cat(1) clone with wings.

the xonsh shell - Xonsh is a Python-powered, cross-platform, Unix-gazing shell language and command prompt.

fzf - A command-line fuzzy finder written in Go

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