MediumLow Cortisol Switch From oh-my-zsh to Starhip | by Josh | Medium
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Low Cortisol Switch From oh-my-zsh to Starhip

2 min readJun 22, 2026

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Starship logo above the oh my zsh logo

· Background
· Motivation
· Steps
∘ Uninstalling and Cleanup
∘ Installing and Configuring Starship
∘ Quick Tip
· The One thing that was missing that I immediately noticed
· GitHub Story Link

Background

https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh

Oh My Zsh is an open source, community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration.

https://github.com/starship/starship

The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell!

Motivation

I’ve been using oh-my-zsh for the past 8 years when a coworker recommended it to me during an internship.

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Recently I heard about starship and wanted to switch things up and see if it would be snappier.

Steps

Uninstalling and Cleanup

$ ~/.oh-my-zsh/tools/uninstall.sh
# This seems to create an automatic backup of the .zshrc
# location: ~/.zshrc.omz-uninstalled-****-**-**_**-**-**
$ rm -rf ~/.oh-my-zsh
$ code ~/.zshrc
# Now we need to cleanup all the oh-my-zsh config that was in the .zshrc

Installing and Configuring Starship

I used brew for this

$ brew install starship

I’ve started with a simple preset

$ starship preset plain-text-symbols -o ~/.config/starsip.toml

Now I’ll edit it slightly…

$ code ~/.config/starship.toml
# ...

Here are some sections that I have changed:

format = "$directory$git_branch$character"
add_newline = false

[character]
success_symbol = "[>](bold green)"
error_symbol = "[>](bold red)"

Looks like this now:

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Screenshot from ghostty

Quick Tip

use starship timings to check your speed.

knowledge-transfer on git main > starship timings

Here are the timings of modules in your prompt (>=1ms or output):
directory - 22ms - "knowledge-transfer "
character - <1ms - "> "
git_branch - <1ms - "on git main "

The One thing that was missing that I immediately noticed

The bind keys for moving the front and back of the prompt with the macOS function keys!

Add them by adding these lines to your ~/.zshrc config:

bindkey "^[[H" beginning-of-line
bindkey "^[[F" end-of-line

GitHub Story Link

https://github.com/standardloop/knowledge-transfer/blob/main/07-moving-from-ohmyzsh-to-starship/README.md

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Josh
Josh

Written by Josh

Hi, I'm Josh! I'm a Site Reliability Engineer. I love learning and contributing.