I crossed the line from “just a terminal” into “I themed my shell again instead of doing work?” territory. 😅

This round of tweaks was all about three pillars:

Starship to pretty up bash without rewriting my life in zsh config.
micro to escape vim/nano purgatory with a friendlier terminal editor.
fish to make the interactive shell feel like it belongs in this century.

All of this is running on Fedora 43 Workstation (GNOME/Wayland) in Ptyxis, on my battle-worn i7 laptop that used to run Windows 10 until Microsoft decided it was “too old for Windows 11, but not too old to nag.” 🙃

Step 1: Prettying up bash with Starship

This whole adventure started with an honest thought: “bash is fine… but it looks like it time-travelled here from 1998.” So I didn’t ditch bash first – I just gave it a glow-up.

Why Starship?

Starship is a minimal, blazingly fast shell prompt that works with bash, zsh, fish, and others. It’s configured using a single starship.toml file, which already sounded nicer than juggling multiple shell-specific config fragments.

Add in:

The Catppuccin Powerline preset (pastel colors + powerline segments).
The Anonymice Mono Nerd Font for all the pretty icons and glyphs.

Suddenly, bash goes from “Unix 101” to “modern pastel cyber-wizard” with one config file and a couple of commands. ✨

Installing Starship on Fedora 43 (bash + GNOME/Wayland)

First, install Starship. I stuck with the official script and local bin install:

curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sh -s -- -b ~/.local/bin

That drops the starship binary into ~/.local/bin, which is nicely user-scoped and plays well under Wayland in GNOME sessions.

Then I wired it into bash by editing ~/.bashrc:

eval "$(starship init bash)"

Save the file, open a new terminal, and you should immediately see a different prompt. No reboot, no drama.

Catppuccin Powerline preset + Nerd Font

The stock Starship prompt is already decent, but this is Linux—we don’t stop at “decent.” I used the Catppuccin Powerline preset:

starship preset catppuccin-powerline -o ~/.config/starship.toml

That command generates (or overwrites) ~/.config/starship.toml with the Catppuccin Powerline setup. Now the prompt:

Uses a pleasant pastel palette.
Has powerline-style segments.
Shows useful info like directory, git status, exit codes, etc.

To complete the look, I set Anonymice Mono Nerd Font as the font in Ptyxis:

Install Anonymice Mono Nerd Font (system-wide or in your user fonts).
Open Ptyxis preferences.
Set the terminal font to Anonymice Mono Nerd Font.

Result: bash suddenly looks like it belongs in 2025. Nice colors, smooth separators, and all the nerdy icons show up perfectly.

At this point, bash looked good. So naturally, the next thing my brain did was… nitpick the editor.

Step 2: Hunting for a friendlier terminal editor

Once the prompt got a makeover, the editor became the next pain point.

Nano felt too basic.
Vim reminded me I am, in fact, mortal.
Emacs looked at me and said, “Install me if you’re ready for a religion, not an editor.”

I went down a small rabbit hole of “modern terminal editors” and bumped into things like micro, helix, and kakoune.

Tiny comparison: micro vs helix vs kakoune

Here’s how the contenders looked from the perspective of a recovering Windows power user who has spent years in Notepad++, Visual Studio, and VS Code:

micro

Pros
- Familiar keybindings: Ctrl+S to save, Ctrl+Q to quit, Ctrl+C/V for copy-paste.
- Modern feel: status bar, syntax highlighting, multiple colors, mouse support.
- Works great in SSH sessions and inside any terminal.
- Configurable with a simple config file and supports plugins.
Cons
- Not as “insanely scriptable and extensible” as vim/emacs, but honestly, that’s a feature for most people.

helix

Pros
- Very modern, powerful, and fast.
- Modal editing (vim-style) with a deep feature set.
- Great language server (LSP) integration for coding.
Cons
- The modal mindset and keybindings are a commitment.
- It felt like I’d be trading “vim pain” for “new, different modal pain.”

kakoune

Pros
- Very powerful and composable.
- Interesting selection-first workflow that some people absolutely love.
Cons
- Also very different from regular “GUI editor” workflows.
- Not ideal if your muscle memory is Ctrl+S and Ctrl+Z, not “tap this cryptic combo first.”

Given my history as a Windows power user, the real filter was:

“Will this behave like a normal editor with normal shortcuts so my brain doesn’t revolt?”

Micro passed that test with flying colors. So, micro it is. ✍️

Installing micro on Fedora 43

On Fedora, micro is trivial to install:

sudo dnf install micro

You can also use the official installer script if you like keeping binaries under /usr/local/bin, but dnf was good enough for my needs.

Making micro the default editor (bash)

The next step was making sure that when something calls $EDITOR, I don’t end up in vim by accident.

Add this to ~/.bashrc:

export EDITOR=micro
export VISUAL=micro

Reload the shell:

source ~/.bashrc

Now:

git commit
crontab -e
Random CLI tools that need an editor

…all land in micro, not in some default you forgot existed.

At this stage, my daily setup was:

bash as the shell.
Starship (Catppuccin Powerline) as the prompt.
micro as the default editor.

Which honestly felt like a really nice halfway point: still classic and compatible, but not hostile.

Step 3: Bash is fine… but is it friendly?

Even with a beautiful prompt and a friendly editor, bash started to show its age in one area: interactive friendliness.

Bash is:

Rock solid.
POSIX-ish.
Supported literally everywhere.

But day-to-day, small things nagged:

Completions are there, but you have to coax them out through config and additional scripts.
History search and reuse are clunky compared to newer shells.
No inline auto-suggestions by default.
Error messages and syntax feel… historical.

After a few too many YouTube videos of shells doing inline suggestions, smart completions, and colorful everything, the thought crept in:

“What if I keep bash for scripts and system stuff, but use something friendlier for my interactive shell?”

Which is how I ended up shell shopping.

Step 4: Shell shopping – zsh, Nushell, and fish

Once you open this door, three names dominate the “bash alternative” conversation:

zsh
Nushell
fish

Here’s how they looked from my Fedora 43, GNOME/Wayland, “Windows refugee” perspective:

zsh

Pros
- Very powerful, almost a “bash++”.
- Tons of plugins and frameworks (oh-my-zsh, zinit, etc.).
- With enough plugins, you can get fish-like autosuggestions and a fancy prompt.
Cons
- The full experience heavily depends on plugin managers and manual tuning.
- It felt like I’d be trading bash complexity for zsh complexity, without a huge bump in friendliness out of the box.

Nushell

Pros
- Treats output as structured data, not just text.
- Commands output tables and rich data types.
- Very cool for data workflows and scripting in a modern way.
Cons
- Very different mental model.
- Possibly overkill as a first step away from bash.
- Some tools and muscle memory don’t map one-to-one.

fish (Friendly Interactive SHell)

Pros
- Designed for interactive use first.
- Inline autosuggestions (in gray) that you can accept with a single key press.
- Great completions out of the box.
- Readable, modern syntax and a straightforward config.fish.
- Docs and community are very beginner-friendly.
Cons
- Not POSIX, so shell scripts should not be written in fish if you care about portability.
- Some advanced bash tricks don’t translate directly, but you can always run bash when you need it.

Given all that, fish seemed like the perfect match for my current brain:

Bash stays around for scripts and compatibility.
Fish takes over as the daily interactive shell.
Starship and micro come along for the ride.

Step 5: Installing fish and making it the default (safely)

Install fish on Fedora 43

On Fedora Workstation:

sudo dnf install fish

You can try it immediately by just typing:

fish

If you hate it, type exit and you’re back to bash. No commitment yet.

Before setting fish as the default, make sure it’s in /etc/shells:

cat /etc/shells | grep fish || echo /usr/bin/fish | sudo tee -a /etc/shells

Then change the shell for your user:

chsh -s /usr/bin/fish

Log out of GNOME, log back in, start Ptyxis — now you’re in fish by default.

Bash is still installed, still there, and all your scripts with #!/usr/bin/bash continue working as normal.

Step 6: Wiring Starship and micro into fish

Fish has its own config file, config.fish, which lives in ~/.config/fish/.

Add Starship to fish

Create the config directory (if it doesn’t exist) and edit the config file:

mkdir -p ~/.config/fish
micro ~/.config/fish/config.fish

Add this line:

starship init fish | source

Save it, open a new terminal, and your Catppuccin Powerline Starship prompt is now running inside fish. Same pastel goodness, new friendly shell.

Keep micro as the default editor in fish

To keep the editor consistent, I set EDITOR and VISUAL as universal variables in fish:

set -Ux EDITOR micro
set -Ux VISUAL micro

Universal variables are remembered globally for your user across fish sessions, so you don’t have to re-export them everywhere.