A small dedicated "modeline" window for shell prompt.

[mbachry]

Hi, I'm sharing my recent kitty idea and its implementation: https://github.com/mbachry/kitty-modeline/.

It started with my frustration with starship. First, while it adds a lot of useful information to the shell prompt, it can also create a lot of visual clutter. The prompt line gets so long that the default starship configuration puts a newline between the prompt and the cursor, which I for one find ugly and distracting. The bottom of the screen seems like a much better location for this kind of contextual information, just like in Emacs or vim. Second, some starship plugins are really slow, most notably the git status plugin. Anyone who uses starship in Linux git repository or systemd knows the pain of a laggy shell line. The best way to solve this problem is to update starship prompt asynchronously outside bash process and that's what kitty-modeline also provides.

While it's probably possible to do a similar thing with ncurses and tmux-like solutions, it's all too big can of worms to me. A dedicated kitty window and an external process seems like a less buggy solution with no corner cases. All what's required on bash side is setting BASH_PROMPT.

Here's what it looks like in practice:

recording.mp4

Note that kitty-modeline is a patch for kitty, not a kitten etc., so installation may be a bit more painful than usual. Also I tested it only on Linux. And nothing at the kitty side of things is starship specific - this part is controlled by an external process configurable with modeline_command kitty option and can be replaced with something else.

[kovidgoyal]

The general solution for this requires #2391