Wouldn’t that also be the two things one would do in bash?

This is true. However I was calling out, wrt fish, the only two additional "plugin" type things I add in order to have a comfortable shell environment.

Fish conveniently provides history based autocomplete so I don't need to setup some plugin for that.

Why do you need starship.rs?

You don't need it. But it's just a really good, no-bullshit, customizable prompt, and you can use it with basically any shell you like, drop-in

Yeah. I love the default starship and install it on every shell I use, currently PowerShell + fish + bash. It shows me all kinds of useful info like which k8s cluster I'm logged into, which AWS/Azure/GCP account, whether the current directory has uncommitted git changes...

I think I misunderstand what "prompt" is referring to here. What is it?

When you open a new shell, by default it'll say something like `user@hostname: cursor`. Starship lets you change that to whatever you want, but out of the box it hides unnecessary information, and shows you stuff like the your language and package versions, if you're navigated into a git repo, for example. Take a look at it yourself, there's a lot you can do

Based on my experience opening a clone of the nixpkgs repo the other day... I don't think so :)