What is starcommand?

Starcommand is a shell greeting script that draws a different rocket ship in your terminal every time you open a new tab or window. It works in bash, zsh, fish, and PowerShell, so you can use it on Mac, Linux, or Windows without switching your setup. Each rocket is built from a palette of six color codes. The colors control everything: which 18 cells around the rocket light up as stars, which of 8 flame shapes appears at the bottom, and the overall color scheme of the body and portholes. The math means there are roughly two times ten to the forty-third power distinct rockets possible, which is more than you could ever see in a human lifetime of opening terminals. Each launch draws a fresh palette from your system's random source, so two identical rockets appearing twice is, for all practical purposes, impossible. The interesting flip side is that every rocket is fully reproducible. Because the six hex codes determine everything about how a rocket looks, saving those codes saves the entire design. Open the same six codes in bash on your laptop and in PowerShell on a Windows machine and you get the identical stars in the identical positions with the identical flame. The project includes a parity test that runs all four shell implementations against the same reference and checks for zero differences. The star command manages your collection. You can save a rocket you like, list your saved favorites, browse your recent history to rescue one that rolled up a few tabs ago, and preview any custom palette before adding it. A weight setting controls how often your terminal shows a saved favorite versus rolling something new. Color modes let you switch star colors between gold, plain white, and a neon mode that assigns every star its own color from a 28-color wheel. Installing is a single curl or PowerShell command depending on your shell. Running star update fetches newer versions, and the tool can optionally check for updates in the background on a weekly schedule if you opt in.