This I typed

For years my shell prompt was whatever shipped by default. A path, a percent sign, done. I never touched it. I looked at Powerlevel10k once, the segmented rainbow blocks, the powerline arrows nesting into each other, and closed the tab. Busy, and somehow still dull. Not a thing I wanted to read ten thousand times a day.

So I left it alone. That sounds like restraint. It was neglect. I noticed it properly the other day, in the middle of building a colour theme. For a week I'd argued with myself over whether a single class selector deserved tinting, pulling anything out of the editor that wasn't earning its place. Then I looked down at the prompt. I read it more than any screen I own, and there was nothing in it I had decided on.

So I built it. A bare .zshrc, with the three things I actually use added by hand through Homebrew: syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, completions. The one trap is load order. Autosuggestions first, highlighting dead last, or it quietly stops colouring and tells you nothing. That cost me twenty stupid minutes.

The prompt is Starship. The draw is one TOML file. Format strings, named modules, colours set as variables at the top. It lives in my chezmoi repo next to the Caddyfile, so I can diff it, revert it, read every line. This I typed.

I copied Pure, more or less. Two lines, no backgrounds, no segments. Directory, git branch and state, then the prompt character alone on the line below. The exit code shows only when a command fails. By the end nothing decorative was left, which was the point.

I'm not faster. The interface I look at most used to be the one I'd thought about least. Now it isn't.