a journal of interesting technical ideas . . . a journal of interesting technical ideas . . .A shell is a tool used to execute commands in an operating systems. We most commonly think about shells as graphical (GUI) or command-line (text user interface or “TUI”), although I suppose you could imagine a spoken interface or mixed reality interface. In the context of “Linux”, it’s used mostly to refer to the specific TUI environment in use. Most Linux distributions ship with the Bourne shell (“sh”) and BASH (Bourne again Shell). Here I’m describing my preferred setup for that environment.
I prefer fish (friendly interactive shell), which does a better job of suggesting syntax. The commands below show installation in a Debian distrobution. chsh is “change shell” and which provides the full path to the executable.
sudo apt install fish chsh -s $(which fish)
I also enjoy a snazzier presentation of the command line, similar to the Powerline style. For that I use Starship. Starship uses a font that has symbols built in to give a more graphical presentation, so you’ll need to download a nerd font. I’m currently using Overpass.
Install Starship:
curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sh and add a line to ~/.bashrc to start it with bash. Why bother, since we switched to fish above? Mostly a mental hangup, but there are times you get dropped back to a bash shell and I like it to be pretty. eval “$(starship init bash)”
Setup Starship for Fish by adding a line to ~/.config/fish/config.fish
starship init fish | source
Finally, the default Starship scheme is pretty pedestrian. It can be customized to your hearts content, but a good set of examples are available and easily selectable. I use the catppuccin-powerline preset.
starship preset catppuccin-powerline -o ~/.config/starship.toml