How to suppress (or customize) Mac Terminal shell prompt

Question

Currently in my Terminal, every shell prompt looks like ComputerName: FooDir UserName$. The UserName part simply wastes too much space out of my precio

Answer 1

2019 onwards, MacOS default shell is Z Shell. To customize command prompt, add a file named .zshrc in user home and put following line that sets a PS1 environment variable with desired prompt format:

export PS1="[%n]%~> "

Open new terminal

This is result of following format expansion:

• %n User name
• %~ Current directory

See full list of available expansions here.

Answer 2

Here's an excellent article with a full list of Variables and Colors:

Customize your Shell Command Prompt

For a simple, minimalistic prompt, you can try this. Add the following line to your .bash_profile or simply test it first by running it in your terminal:

export PS1="\[\033[0m\]\w\$ "

It'll look something like this:

Here's my Prompt (source), also very simple:

export PS1="\[\033[1;97m\]\u: \[\033[1;94m\]\w \[\033[1;97m\]\$\[\033[0m\] "

Answer 3

Your answer can be found right here:http://www.hypexr.org/bash_tutorial.php#vi at about the middle of the page. :)

Answer 4

The prompt is defined by the environment variable PS1 which you can define in .bash_profile.

To edit it, open or create the (hidden) file .bash_profile:

nano .bash_profile

and add a line that says

export PS1=""

Between the quotation marks, you can insert what you would like as your terminal prompt. You can also use variables there:

• \d – date
• \t – time
• \h – hostname
• \# – command number
• \u – username
• \W – current directory (e.g.: Desktop)
• \w – current directory path (e.g.: /Users/Admin/Desktop)

The default prompt for common Linux distributions would be \w $, which evaluates to ~ $ in your home directory or e.g. /Users $ somewhere else. There are also website (like this one) that can help you with building your prompt.

If you want to remove the UserName part, your choice would be \h: \w$.

Once you made your changes, save the file with Control+o, Return, Control+x.