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Comment by daliusd | Hacker News Reader

I still think minimal is appropriate in this case as it shows only what’s relevant in the context.

You're missing the point. It runs every time you show the prompt. Anything that does that is not minimal and it increases the risk of failure.

Some things that you use regularly should be kept as minimal and as stable as possible. To me that includes the shell prompt, editor, browser for example.

I am cli/vim guy - that’s my daily tools. Starship is very stable and it is useful for me. The only problem I have experienced is with custom extension I wrote myself (problem was slowness not stability).

That's all well and good, but has nothing to do with my argument.

If you need to invoke a program for every prompt, when the alternative is to just let the shell do it's thing, it's no longer "minimal", period.

Well, we are arguing about semantics. You say that minimal means that it must be functionally minimal. I say that minimal UX is valid meaning as well.

> Well, we are arguing about semantics.

No, we are not. "minimal" has a defined meaning, and "minimal" and "minimalism" as a design philosophy are not the same.

To use your own argument against you, no, a minimal prompt does not look like this:

It looks like this:

Please explain how this "uses my own argument against me", when my argument is that "minimal" prompt doesn't involve calling an external program to build the prompt? Both "$ " and "" can be built by the shell itself.

Heh oh my bad, I didn't realise you have the privilege of gatekeeping what "minimal" means ;)

I see one dictionary definition is "the least possible". Seems like the least possible prompt is no prompt at all, but it's really just a matter of opinion ;)

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