[Zarel]

I'm surprised Starship is so popular. It's missing really basic powerlevel10k features like empty segments. If you look at some examples:

https://starship.rs/presets/gruvbox-rainbow

You can see that when the segments are empty, they still appear as a 1-width segment, rather than entirely disappearing.

It also makes you configure many things by hand. powerlevel10k has an interactive wizard that lets you design your prompt one option at a time (do you want a nerd font? do you want it one line or two? etc) but Starship makes you manually write escape codes if your preferences don't match one of the presets.

No judgment, but I do wonder what people like about Starship that makes up for these things.

[dagi3d]

Starship allows empty segments, I in this specific case it's just how the preset/theme works as it uses the Unicode character as separator and it needs to set the background and foreground colors depending on which modules is surrounded by

[Zarel]

Every preset with powerlevel10k-style segments don't support hiding empty segments. Look at Pastel Powerline, Tokyo Night, Gruvbox Rainbow, Catppucin Powerline...

https://starship.rs/presets/#pastel-powerline

I tried making my own and the config TOML syntax isn't expressive enough to support hiding empty segments.

You're right that it's the thing with the Unicode character as separator, which all the alternatives handle just fine: powerlevel10k, tide, oh-my-posh... it's just everyone seems to love Starship, and that's what confuses me.