bug: Starship - unusable font in Linux console (TTY)

[LemmusLemmus]

Are you following the right branch?

• My Nixpkgs and Home Manager versions are in sync

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Issue description

By default, Starship requires a nerd font to display properly. However, in the TTY / virtual console, the font choice is severely limited and one cannot use nerd fonts.
Hence, with Starship enabled, all I see is squares of varying colors. instead of the usual symbols.

Steps to reproduce

1. Enable Starship: programs.starship.enable = true;
2. Let bashIntegration be set to true (default) programs.starship.enableBashIntegration = true; (assuming that one uses bash in the TTY).
3. Switch to e.g. TTY2 (ctrl+alt+F2).
4. Provided that the Starship config is not specifically such that it avoids using special characters, one should see squares in the prompt where usually such special characters are displayed.

Proposed fix

In starship.nix, one could simply, in addition to the current $TERM != "dumb" check, add a check $TERM != "linux" (as proposed here).
There could potentially be more places in the home-manager where such a check could be useful.

However, I guess it is possible that one uses a custom Starship configuration that completely avoids nerd fonts and other uncommon Unicode characters. One might even want to go as far as using separate configs for the TTY and elsewhere.

This issue is rather easy to fix on ones own, by simply disabling e.g. bashIntegration and copying and modifying the bash initExtra, so I guess this issue might be more of a matter of opinion (although judging by the home-manager code it might be slightly trickier if you use the fish shell in the TTY). Feel free to close this issue as not planned in that case. I just thought it was worth mentioning.

Maintainer CC

No response

System information

 - system: `"x86_64-linux"`
 - host os: `Linux 6.12.7, NixOS, 24.11 (Vicuna), 24.11.20250103.d29ab98`
 - multi-user?: `yes`
 - sandbox: `yes`
 - version: `nix-env (Nix) 2.24.11`
 - nixpkgs: `/nix/store/mr3pq6jnd0j7vny01q8r8a2ij8z2mn2d-source`