Starship Prompt in Claude Code's Status Line

Claude Code has a status line at the bottom of the terminal that shows you the current model and context usage. It’s useful, but it doesn’t show you where you are in the filesystem or what git branch you’re on. I already have Starship configured with all that information for my shell prompt, so I figured: why not reuse it?

Claude Code lets you set a custom status line command in ~/.claude/settings.json. The command receives a JSON blob on stdin with the model name, working directory, and context window usage, and whatever you print to stdout becomes the status line.

The trick is getting starship to output something Claude Code can actually render. Starship detects which shell it’s running in and wraps ANSI color codes with shell-specific escape sequences - %{...%} for zsh, \[...\] for bash. Claude Code isn’t a shell, so those sequences show up as literal garbage:

[Opus 4.6] | ctx:18% | %{%}~/p/dot-files%{%} on %{%} %{%}main%{%} %{%}❯%{%}

The fix: set STARSHIP_SHELL=plain. There’s no actual “plain” shell type in starship’s code (I checked - it has bash, fish, zsh, etc.), but unrecognized values fall through to an “unknown” handler that outputs raw ANSI codes without any shell wrapping.

I also didn’t want the ❯ prompt character in a status line, so I point starship at a separate config that disables the character and line_break modules:

# claude-starship.toml
[character]
disabled = true

[line_break]
disabled = true

Here’s the script:

#!/bin/bash
SCRIPT_DIR=$(cd "$(dirname "$0")" && pwd)

if [ "$1" = "install" ]; then
    SETTINGS="$HOME/.claude/settings.json"
    COMMAND="$SCRIPT_DIR/claude-statusline.sh"
    mkdir -p "$HOME/.claude"
    if [ -f "$SETTINGS" ]; then
        jq --arg cmd "$COMMAND" \
          '.statusLine = {"type": "command", "command": $cmd}' \
          "$SETTINGS" > "$SETTINGS.tmp" \
            && mv "$SETTINGS.tmp" "$SETTINGS"
    else
        jq -n --arg cmd "$COMMAND" \
          '{"statusLine": {"type": "command", "command": $cmd}}' \
          > "$SETTINGS"
    fi
    echo "Installed. Restart Claude Code to apply."
    exit 0
fi

input=$(cat)
MODEL=$(echo "$input" | jq -r '.model.display_name')
CURRENT_DIR=$(echo "$input" | jq -r '.workspace.current_dir')
CONTEXT_PERCENT=$(echo "$input" | jq -r \
  '.context_window.used_percentage // 0' | cut -d. -f1)

YELLOW='\033[1;33m'
BLUE='\033[0;34m'
NC='\033[0m'

STARSHIP_PROMPT=""
if command -v starship &>/dev/null; then
    STARSHIP_PROMPT=$(cd "$CURRENT_DIR" 2>/dev/null \
      && STARSHIP_SHELL=plain \
         STARSHIP_CONFIG="$SCRIPT_DIR/claude-starship.toml" \
         starship prompt --terminal-width=80 2>/dev/null \
      | tr -d '\n')
fi

printf "${BLUE}[%s]${NC} | ${YELLOW}ctx:%s%%${NC} | %s\n" \
  "$MODEL" "$CONTEXT_PERCENT" "$STARSHIP_PROMPT"

Drop the script and claude-starship.toml in your dotfiles, then run claude-statusline.sh install. It uses jq to merge the statusLine config into your existing ~/.claude/settings.json without clobbering anything else.

Now my status line shows the model, context usage, current directory, and git branch - all rendered by my existing starship config. And because it’s in my private dotfiles repo, install works on any machine.