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  5. Starship (Shell Prompt) vs tmux

Starship (Shell Prompt) vs tmux

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

tmux
tmux
Stacks197
Followers137
Votes2
GitHub Stars39.5K
Forks2.3K
Starship (Shell Prompt)
Starship (Shell Prompt)
Stacks25
Followers37
Votes8
GitHub Stars52.0K
Forks2.3K

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

Introduction

In this article, we will compare the key differences between Starship (Shell Prompt) and tmux. Both Starship and tmux are popular tools used in the command-line environment, but they serve different purposes and have distinct features.

  1. Customization: Starship offers extensive customization options, allowing users to personalize the prompt based on their preferences. It supports a wide range of shell prompts, themes, and configurations, making it highly adaptable to different workflows. On the other hand, tmux provides a versatile terminal multiplexer, allowing users to manage multiple terminal sessions within a single window. It provides customizable key bindings, layouts, and panes for efficiently organizing and navigating through terminal windows.

  2. Workspaces: Tmux provides a workspace management feature, allowing users to create and switch between different workspaces or sessions. Each session can have multiple windows and panes, which helps in organizing and dividing tasks. Starship, on the other hand, does not provide workspace management as it focuses on enhancing the shell prompt's appearance and functionality.

  3. Integration: Tmux integrates seamlessly with various terminal emulators and supports various operating systems, making it a widely adopted tool. It can be easily integrated into existing workflows and can be used alongside other command-line utilities. Starship, on the other hand, is a shell prompt tool that integrates with different shell environments, providing a consistent and unified prompt experience across different shells.

  4. Status Information: Starship excels in providing informative and customizable status information in the shell prompt. It can display various details such as the current time, git branch, battery status, and more, allowing users to have quick access to essential information. While tmux also allows customization of status bars, its focus is more on the terminal multiplexer functionality rather than providing extensive status information.

  5. Scripting Abilities: Tmux provides scripting abilities, allowing users to automate and streamline tasks within the terminal. It supports controlling sessions, windows, panes, and even sending commands to different terminal screens programmatically. Starship does not have scripting abilities as it primarily focuses on enhancing the shell prompt's appearance and functionality.

  6. Cross-Platform Compatibility: Tmux is cross-platform compatible and can be used on different operating systems such as Linux, macOS, and Windows. It provides consistent functionality and behavior across various environments. On the other hand, Starship is also cross-platform compatible and can be used with different Unix-like shells, making it suitable for users with diverse operating system preferences.

In summary, Starship and tmux are both powerful command-line tools with distinct purposes. Starship mainly focuses on enhancing the shell prompt's appearance and functionality, providing extensive customization options and informative status information. Tmux, on the other hand, is a versatile terminal multiplexer that allows users to manage multiple terminal sessions and provides scripting abilities for automation.

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Detailed Comparison

tmux
tmux
Starship (Shell Prompt)
Starship (Shell Prompt)

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.

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.

Allow Multiple Terminals
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
39.5K
GitHub Stars
52.0K
GitHub Forks
2.3K
GitHub Forks
2.3K
Stacks
197
Stacks
25
Followers
137
Followers
37
Votes
2
Votes
8
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 2
    Reliable, easy and highly customizable
Pros
  • 2
    Cross-shell
  • 1
    Multi-threaded
  • 1
    Configurable
  • 1
    Excellent documentation
  • 1
    Docs localized to Japanese
Integrations
Linux
Linux
FreeBSD
FreeBSD
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 tmux, Starship (Shell Prompt)?

picocli

picocli

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.

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.

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.

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