StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Languages
  4. Shell Utilities
  5. Starship (Shell Prompt) vs picocli

Starship (Shell Prompt) vs picocli

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

picocli
picocli
Stacks10
Followers12
Votes8
GitHub Stars5.2K
Forks443
Starship (Shell Prompt)
Starship (Shell Prompt)
Stacks25
Followers37
Votes8
GitHub Stars52.0K
Forks2.3K

picocli vs Starship (Shell Prompt): What are the differences?

picocli: Easily build command line apps with ANSI colors and autocomplete. Library and framework for easily building professional command line applications on the JVM (Java, Groovy, Kotlin, Scala, etc). Usage help with ANSI colors. Autocomplete. Nested subcommands. Annotations and programmatic API. Easy to include as source to avoid adding dependencies. More than just a command line parser; Starship (Shell Prompt): Extremely customizable prompt for any shell. Starship is the minimal, blazing fast, and extremely customizable prompt for any shell! The prompt shows information you need while you're working, while staying sleek and out of the way.

picocli and Starship (Shell Prompt) belong to "Shell Utilities" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by picocli are:

  • Java 5-13ea
  • annotation API
  • programmatic API

On the other hand, Starship (Shell Prompt) provides the following key features:

  • Prompt character turns red if the last command exits with non-zero code
  • Current username if not the same as the logged-in user
  • Current Node.js version

picocli and Starship (Shell Prompt) are both open source tools. Starship (Shell Prompt) with 2.51K GitHub stars and 77 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than picocli with 1.46K GitHub stars and 148 GitHub forks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

picocli
picocli
Starship (Shell Prompt)
Starship (Shell Prompt)

Library and framework for easily building professional command line applications on the JVM (Java, Groovy, Kotlin, Scala, etc). Usage help with ANSI colors. Autocomplete. Nested subcommands. Annotations and programmatic API. Easy to include as source to avoid adding dependencies. More than just a command line parser.

Starship is the minimal, blazing fast, and extremely customizable prompt for any shell! The prompt shows information you need while you're working, while staying sleek and out of the way.

Java 5-13ea;annotation API;programmatic API;GraalVM integration - for extremely fast startup;nested subcommands to any depth;strongly typed option parameters;strongly typed positional parameters;many, many built-in types;easily add custom type converters;interactive password options;supports Maps for options and positional parameters (like -Dkey=value Java system properties);no boilerplate code, just implement Runnable or Callable;supports both mixins and subclassing for reuse;built-in support for standard --help and --version options (zero code);built-in help subcommand;uses STDERR for error messages, STDOUT for requested help by default;allows any option prefix;POSIX-style clustered short options;highly configurable parser;parser tracing to facilitate troubleshooting;quality documentation;built-in Groovy script support;easily integrates with Dependency Injection containers;easily integrates with JLine 2 and JLine 3 to create interactive shell applications
Prompt character turns red if the last command exits with non-zero code; Current username if not the same as the logged-in user; Current Node.js version; Current Rust version; Current Ruby version; Current Python version; Current Go version; Nix-shell environment detection; Current version of package in current directory; Current battery level and status; Current Git branch and rich repo status; Execution time of the last command if it exceeds the set threshold; Indicator for jobs in the background
Statistics
GitHub Stars
5.2K
GitHub Stars
52.0K
GitHub Forks
443
GitHub Forks
2.3K
Stacks
10
Stacks
25
Followers
12
Followers
37
Votes
8
Votes
8
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 1
    Easy to Use
  • 1
    Flexible
  • 1
    Actively maintained
  • 1
    Well documented
  • 1
    ANSI colors in usage help
Pros
  • 2
    Cross-shell
  • 1
    Cross-platform
  • 1
    Multi-threaded
  • 1
    Configurable
  • 1
    Excellent documentation
Integrations
Java
Java
Kotlin
Kotlin
Scala
Scala
Groovy
Groovy
Fish Shell
Fish Shell
Haskell
Haskell
Docker
Docker
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Perl
Perl
Terraform
Terraform
Linux
Linux
Git
Git
Lua
Lua
Kotlin
Kotlin

What are some alternatives to picocli, Starship (Shell Prompt)?

TortoiseSVN

TortoiseSVN

It is an Apache™ Subversion (SVN)® client, implemented as a Windows shell extension. It's intuitive and easy to use, since it doesn't require the Subversion command line client to run. And it is free to use, even in a commercial environment.

tmux

tmux

It enables a number of terminals to be created, accessed, and controlled from a single screen. tmux may be detached from a screen and continue running in the background, then later reattached.

Oh My ZSH

Oh My ZSH

A delightful, open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zsh configuration. It comes bundled with thousands of helpful functions, helpers, plugins, themes.

Try

Try

It lets you run a command and inspect its effects before changing your live system. It uses Linux's namespaces (via unshare) and the overlayfs union filesystem.

Bash-My-AWS

Bash-My-AWS

It is a simple but extremely powerful set of CLI commands for managing resources on Amazon Web Services. They harness the power of Amazon's AWSCLI, while abstracting away verbosity. The project implements some innovative patterns but (arguably) remains simple, beautiful and readable.

navi

navi

It allows you to browse through cheatsheets (that you may write yourself or download from maintainers) and execute commands, prompting for argument values.

fzf

fzf

It is a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder. It's an interactive Unix filter for command-line that can be used with any list; files, command history, processes, hostnames, bookmarks, git commits, etc.

Scoop.sh

Scoop.sh

It installs programs to your home directory by default. So you don’t need admin permissions to install programs, and you won’t see UAC popups every time you need to add or remove a program.

Dockerized

Dockerized

Run popular command-line tools within docker. It works on Linux, MacOS, and Windows (CMD, Powershell, Git Bash). You can quickly try out command line tools without the effort of downloading and installing them.

Fig

Fig

It adds autocomplete to your terminal. As you type, it pops up subcommands, options, and contextually relevant arguments in your existing terminal on macOS.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase