Show HN: Whetuu – a zero-config cross-shell prompt written in Zig

This isn't news, the real news is that the AI tooling allows YOU (specifically) to have a custom prompt tool built specifically for you, in the same or less effort it would take to set up one of the existing prompt tools.

For example, I liked the idea of this but had no interest in the shell history integration; I use atuin.

So I had codex build me one, including the 250ms wait for git, and if git takes longer than that it backgrounds it, uses the last git status until git can return an updated status. https://github.com/linsomniac/jafoprompt

I don’t want my prompt to also handle shell history, and especially in such an “opinionated” way.

What happens to my actual shell-provided history?

Does too much for me.

edit:

> Both files follow the XDG base directory spec, so neither lives in the install directory. Removing whetuu with rm -rf ~/.whetuu cannot take your history with it. whetuu paths prints both locations.

Please stop creating directories in my $HOME.

I didn't quite gel with it, seemed overly, well opinionated for no meaningful performance or otherwise improvement to any other simple prompt.

In order to address several comments I got here, the readme and landing pages have been reworked. I can't change the title here but read as: An opinionated, zero-config status line and history picker for fish, bash and zsh, written in Zig. Also tackled several issues mentioned in different comments (including the install to ~/.local/bin).

Unclear to me: does this also do shell history? I'm using atuin and not interested in changing that. I did just switch over to oh-my-posh a few weeks ago and it's good, but I would be open to trying something else to compare, particularly since I have some directories with monorepos where oh-my-posh goes out to lunch for a couple seconds. Also oh-my-posh sometimes loses its mind and switches back to the default prompt rather than my customized one.

I'm on the fence about my current "2-line prompt, collapsing to a single line" when I press enter. I like that it gives me a lot of room, but there's some information I find I'm wishing was persisted in my shell history (git branch, previous command execution time for long running commands).

This is awesome -

*A history picker on the up arrow*

*Commands are recorded once they finish, and only when they exited cleanly, so typos never clutter the list.*

Where the history is stored? Is it possible to store in single place like user root dir?*

I stopped using fancy prompts at some point. My current prompt is a single $ sign. If I need to know the current dir I just run cwd, I don't need it on every prompt. If I need the git branch just use git status (though aliased to gs [no, I don't use ghostscript]).

> Pronounced FEH-too (/ˈfɛ.tuː/). Stress the first syllable. In Māori wh is an f sound, not a w. The macron in ū makes that vowel long, which is why the ASCII spelling doubles it.

oof. deliberate choice?

a few questions:

i am confused by this line:

You need a Nerd Font. The prompt uses Nerd Font glyphs for the git branch, the language logos and the prompt character. Without one, those show as empty boxes.

this sounds like a nerdfont needs to be installed manually. but that doesn't seem to be the case because it just seems to work. and i don't remember installing such a font.

i also wonder what version it is showing when not in a git repo directory.

finally, how do i edit history entries before rerunning them?

this looks like an excellent, non-rust alternative to starship. nice job.

It used to be the case that seeing cool Show HN projects would get me excited. Ever since the advent of agentic coding, that has been completely lost for me. 9/10 times now they are just claude produced slop with a 3 day long commit history. Quite sad.

please stop piping into bash or sh. force people to use the editor, read the install script, and tell them how to run it