Open-source shells and shell prompts in 2026

Open-source shells and shell prompts

Building blocks for your own system 1

1. 1
   Riposte fwkz

   Python package for wrapping applications inside a tailored interactive shell

   Building block Usable You are building a REPL-style command tool in Python and want the shell plumbing done for you.

   ★ 644 MIT Python Quiet, pushed 3 years ago

Integrations 1

1. 1
   Jj-starship dmmulroy

   Fast unified Starship prompt module for Git and Jujutsu repositories

   Integration Usable You use the Jujutsu version control system with Starship and want accurate status in your prompt.

   ★ 252 MIT Rust Active, pushed 5 days ago

Developer tools 13

1. 1
   Oh My Zsh ohmyzsh

   🙃 A delightful community-driven (with 2,500+ contributors) framework for managing your zsh configuration. Includes 300+ optional plugins (rails, git, macOS, hub, docker, homebrew, node, php, python, etc), 140+ themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community.

   Developer tool Production-ready You use zsh and want useful aliases, git-aware prompts and completions with almost no setup.

   ★ 190k MIT Shell Active, pushed 3 days ago
   
2. 2
   Starship starship

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

   Developer tool Production-ready You want one prompt configuration that looks the same across every shell and machine you use.

   ★ 61k ISC Rust Active, pushed yesterday
   
3. 3
   Nushell nushell

   A new type of shell

   Developer tool Usable Your command-line work is mostly slicing structured data and you want a cross-platform shell that treats it as tables.

   ★ 41k MIT Rust Active, pushed today
4. 4
   fish fish-shell

   The user-friendly command line shell.

   Developer tool Production-ready You want a friendlier interactive shell out of the box and are happy to keep scripts that must be portable in bash or sh.

   ★ 34k See repository Rust Active, pushed 2 days ago
   
5. 5
   Oh My Posh JanDeDobbeleer

   The most customisable and low-latency cross platform/shell prompt renderer

   Developer tool Production-ready You use PowerShell or cmd on Windows, or want a large library of ready themes across shells.

   ★ 24k MIT Go Active, pushed yesterday
6. 6
   Spaceship spaceship-prompt

   🚀✨ Minimalistic, powerful and extremely customizable Zsh prompt

   Developer tool Production-ready You use zsh only and want a featureful prompt written in shell.

   ★ 21k MIT Shell Active, pushed 10 days ago
7. 7
   Pure sindresorhus

   Pretty, minimal and fast ZSH prompt

   Developer tool Production-ready You use zsh and want a clean, quick prompt without configuring segments.

   ★ 14k MIT Shell Active, pushed 29 days ago
8. 8
   Liquid Prompt liquidprompt

   A full-featured & carefully designed adaptive prompt for Bash & Zsh

   Developer tool Production-ready You use bash or zsh on servers and want an informative prompt that is just shell scripts to copy over.

   ★ 4.7k AGPL-3.0 Shell Active, pushed 2 months ago
9. 9
   Polyglot Prompt agkozak

   Color, ASCII-only Git prompt for zsh, bash, ksh93, mksh, pdksh, oksh, dash, yash, busybox ash, and osh

   Developer tool Usable You work across minimal or unusual shells, such as BusyBox or ksh on embedded or BSD systems, and want one consistent prompt.

   ★ 197 MIT Shell Slowing, pushed 5 months ago
10. 10
    Bash Prompt Generator Scriptim

    Customize your Bash Prompt by setting the PS1 variable.

    Developer tool Usable You want a custom bash prompt without learning PS1 escape syntax.

    ★ 872 GPL-3.0 TypeScript Quiet, pushed 17 months ago
11. 11
    Bearings liamg

    :compass: A fast, clean, customisable shell prompt for zsh, bash, fish, and more...

    Developer tool Experimental You want to try a simple YAML-configured prompt and do not need ongoing updates.

    ★ 203 MIT Go Quiet, pushed 4 years ago
12. 12
    Shelby athul

    Shelby is a fast ⚡️ , lightweight ☁️ , minimal✨, shell prompt written in Go.

    Developer tool Experimental You want a tiny, minimal prompt binary and are fine with no further development.

    ★ 197 GPL-3.0 Go Quiet, pushed 5 years ago
13. 13
    Bashed-on-a-feeling yedhink

    :zap: fast and minimalistic git prompt written in bash

    Developer tool Experimental You use plain bash rather than zsh or a prompt framework and want a small git-aware prompt you can read in one file.

    ★ 130 MIT Shell Quiet, pushed 8 years ago

Open-source licenses

• Permissive: 11. Use it anywhere, including in closed products. You keep the copyright notice; Apache-2.0 also grants patent rights.
• Strong copyleft: 2. If you distribute the program or anything built on it, you must release the whole source under the same license.
• Network copyleft: 1. Like GPL, and running a changed version as a web service counts as distributing it, so its users get the source too.

Languages

Shell 6, Rust 4, Go 3, TypeScript 1 and Python 1.