Bash customization only take place after interacting with the terminal for the first time

Question

sorry for the title, I have no better way to convey what is occurring to me. The situation is the following, I am using bash, wezterm(terminal emulator) and starship (customizable prompt). But for some reason, every time I open a new terminal, it is always the stock/ default prompt, and I have to press enter or type something for it to pickup the updates. I have no idea what kind of behavior is happening here

As you can see, the first line is the line that has no styling applied, while the second line is how its supposed to look.

My observations are the following

1. This always happens when opening a new terminal
2. This does not seem to happen when I ssh into this machine
3. This does not happen when I open a new terminal inside a terminal via multiplexer like zellij

The weird thing is, that it works properly after typing anything. This is why I have no idea how to debug this. There is probably something weird happening that I am not aware of how it works.

My bash setup can be found here, but I'll outline the most important files here

my bash_profile which just sources my .bash_rc

source ~/.bashrc

My .bashrc

# ~/.bashrc: executed by bash(1) for non-login shells.
# see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files (in the package bash-doc)
# for examples
# If not running interactively, don't do anything

if [ -e ~/.bash_aliases ]; then
    source ~/.bash_aliases >/dev/null 2>&1
fi

case $- in
*i*) ;;
*) return ;;
esac

.. truncated, other stuff is the default that comes in bashrc basically

And finally my .bash_aliases

unalias -a
set -o vi
...

# Have to install bash-preexec as well
[[ -e ~/.bash-preexec.sh ]] && source ~/.bash-preexec.sh

# here are the evals and they are 100% evaluated
source ~/.config/wezterm/wezterm.sh
eval "$(starship init bash)"

[[ -e ~/.config/personal/bash/alias_personal ]] && \. ~/.config/personal/bash/alias_personal

This also might be an issue with the library itself, but I highly doubt this. This behavior started occurring after I was fiddling with my config, its been months now.

Answer 1

I know this one is pretty old, but in case anyone else finds this while trying to resolve the same issue, Chris Davies is 100% Correct. Because the prompt is set via the precmd function, this normally requires SOME sort of interaction occur.

However, the easiest resolution is to execute that precmd on initialization.

I sorted this by adding the starship_precmd directly after initializing starship.

In your case Nikola, this mnodification to your .bash_aliases should solve the issue:

unalias -a
set -o vi
...

# Have to install bash-preexec as well
[[ -e ~/.bash-preexec.sh ]] && source ~/.bash-preexec.sh

# here are the evals and they are 100% evaluated
source ~/.config/wezterm/wezterm.sh
eval "$(starship init bash)"

# Execute the precmd to set initial PS1
starship_precmd

[[ -e ~/.config/personal/bash/alias_personal ]] && \. ~/.config/personal/bash/alias_personal

Answer 2

Starship applies its configuration each time you execute any command (see starship init bash --full-code-print for one example of it setting up $PROMPT_COMMAND) but as far as I can see not in the .bashrc or .bash_profile. Aside from the incredible inefficiency this incurs, it also means that the prompt cannot be set until you execute a command. A null command (i.e. hitting enter by itself) is acceptable here, but the point is that you need to do something.

It is how it is.

Personally, if all I wanted was a fancy prompt then I'd set that directly in ~/.bashrc (and have ~/.bash_profile call it on login).