powerline-go

A beautiful and useful low-latency prompt for your shell, written in go

Explore on GitHub Read Hacker News discussions

3Distinct people

4Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

2.9KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A beautiful and useful low-latency prompt for your shell, written in go

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

b-ryan/powerline-shell · linked in 2 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-08-21 14:52:54 UTC to 2021-10-30 18:31:12 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	1	2
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1

What Hacker News says

4 sources

watermelon0·Oct 30, 2021

It's amazing how slow shell prompts can be when you enable just a few addons. It can easily take a few seconds to show a prompt. I've had good results with https://github.com/justjanne/powerline-go in the past.

In My Faster Bash Startup (2020)

ingve·Aug 22, 2017Submission

Powerline-go: beautiful, useful and fast prompt for your shell

4 points · Open discussion

kuschku·Aug 21, 2017

I use powerline-shell in zshell, and was also extremely annoyed by the delay. So, I decided to rewrite https://github.com/banga/powerline-shell in go, and the performance is amazing. The latency went down from several seconds to 200µs (except when git is used, then it’s ~4ms), and it’s fast enough. The repo is at https://github.com/justjanne/powerline-go. Here’s a small video showing just how different the latency is: https://s3.kuschku.de/public/2017-08-21_16-43-41.mp4. Disclaimer: Although the original was MIT, I licensed my rewrite under GPLv3. Improving the latency of software is just such an amazing quality-of-life improvement, it was well worth those 10 hours of work.

In Zsh Configuration from the Ground Up

kuschku·Aug 21, 2017

I decided to rewrite https://github.com/banga/powerline-shell in go after reading this article yesterday evening (almost done, only mercurial, svn and fossil are missing), and the performance is amazing. The latency went down to 200µs (except when git is used, then it’s ~4ms), and it’s fast enough. Here’s a video: https://s3.kuschku.de/public/2017-08-21_16-43-41.mp4 I’ll put it on https://github.com/justjanne/powerline-go later today, once I’m done.

In Latency matters