Setting up a new Mac

It's easy to start with fonts and colours. What matters to me first is being able to open a project and run it. Once Git, package managers and project dependencies are ready, I can spend time on how the terminal looks.

Starship's configuration lives in ~/.config/starship.toml. Seeing the current directory and Git status is enough for me. I don't need every tool's version on every prompt.

Neovim and tmux are part of the setup too. I'd rather add settings when I miss them while working than try to configure everything perfectly on day one. I don't want a pile of settings whose purpose I've forgotten.

Checking the setup

I can check whether the tools are available by asking for their versions:

git --version
node --version
pnpm --version

Those commands working doesn't mean a project is ready. Next I check which Node and package-manager versions the project expects, install its dependencies, and run its own development command. If that fails, I'd sort it out before spending more time on the terminal theme.

The terminal and shell have different jobs. Ghostty is the window I type into. zsh, running inside it, interprets the commands. Starship prepares the directory and Git information in the prompt. Changing one tool's appearance won't necessarily change the others' behaviour.

Here's a small Starship configuration:

format = '$directory$git_branch$character'

[directory]
truncation_length = 2

It displays the directory, the Git branch when available, and the prompt character. The directory path is shortened to two components. The Starship documentation explains the individual modules if you want to extend it.