Sanjeed

Starship > oh-my-zsh for VPS shells

1 min read

Plain bash on a VPS is ugly. No colors, hard to tell where one command ends and another begins. Just a wall of white text.

I was about to install oh-my-zsh like I have on my Mac. But then I got a better suggestion.

Starship

Starship is a cross-shell prompt written in Rust. It’s a compiled binary (not shell scripts like oh-my-zsh), works out of the box with zero config, and auto-detects context like git branches, Python venvs, Node versions.

The key thing for a VPS: no startup overhead. Oh-my-zsh adds slightly noticeable latency on SSH connections. Starship is instant.

Setup

# Install
curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sudo sh -s -- -y
 
# Add to bashrc
echo 'eval "$(starship init bash)"' >> ~/.bashrc
 
# Reload
source ~/.bashrc

That’s it.

The meta part

I didn’t even know Starship existed. I asked Cursor CLI (Claude Opus 4.5) how to make my VPS shell prettier, expecting it to walk me through oh-my-zsh. Instead it suggested Starship and explained why it’s better for remote machines.

AI teaching me new tools I didn’t know I needed. Love it.

Hope this saves you some googling/chatgpting/ai agent searching :)

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