Change Terminal Prompt in Mac OS X

Published on 2014-10-06 by Sunaina Pai

When you open a Terminal in Mac OS X, the default command prompt displayed is a very long name which goes like this: <ComputerName>:<CurrentDirectory> <UserName>$. In my case it was Sunainas-MacBook-Pro:~ sunaina$, quite boring!

I prefer something like sunaina@MacBook:~$, commonly used in the Linux world. I did the following customizations.

• On Terminal, execute the following commands.

  sudo scutil --set ComputerName "MacBook"
  sudo scutil --set LocalHostName "MacBook"
  sudo scutil --set HostName "MacBook"
  

  The ComputerName and LocalHostName are also accessible as Computer Name and Local Hostname respectively, at System Preferences > Sharing. The ComputerName, LocalHostName and HostName are saved in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist.

• Edit the file ~/.bash_profile with the following command.

  mvim ~/.bash_profile
  

• Add the following line to ~/.bash_profile, save and quit.

  export PS1="\u@\h:\w$ "
  

  Here,

  • \u stands for the username of the current user.
  • \h stands for the hostname upto the first '.'.
  • \w stands the current working directory.

• Open a new Terminal. You should see your customized prompt.

Play around with the prompt escapes for the PS1 shell variable and see what you prefer.