How to Customize your Terminal Prompt

December 11th, 2006 - Mac OS X, Command Line, How to, Customize

Whether you use the Terminal occasionally or regularly, you might find it appropriate to change the way it looks beyond the color scheme and transparency settings. How about changing the actual command line prompt? It’s quite easy, and can be a fun way to further customize your Macs appearance. This how-to will involve some really minor usage of the command line, which we assume you’re somewhat familiar with if you are wanting to change the way it looks.

The default command line prompt in Mac OS X is something like:
ComputerName:CurrentDirectory User$ or MacBook:~/Desktop Admin$

Kind of boring and not the best, right? It’s quite easy to change. We’re going to assume you use the default bash shell, so you’ll be editing either the file .bashrc by default, or .profile if you installed fink. At the Terminal prompt, type: nano .bashrc

Now type: export PS1=" "

Between the quotation marks, you can add the following lines to customize your Terminal prompt:

\d - Current date
\t - Current time
\h - Host name
\# - Command number
\u - User name
\W - Current working directory (ie: Desktop/)
\w - Current working directory, full path (ie: /Users/Admin/Desktop)

So, let’s say you want your Terminal prompt to display the User, followed by the hostname, followed by the directory, the .bashrc entry would be:

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

which will look like:
Admin@MacBook~Desktop/$ "

Cool huh? You can also change the prompt itself to anything, it doesn’t have to be the $ sign, simply replace it with whatever else you’d like to use, : for example would be:

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

which is the same as above, but : instead of $
Admin@MacBook~Desktop/: "

So, play around and see what you prefer. By the way, if you’re new to the Terminal text editor nano, you save a file by hitting control-o, and you exit the file and program by hitting control-x. You can also just use a standard text editor, like TextWrangler or TextEdit. There’s also a simple how-to designed to make your Terminal prompt resemble the one from the TV show LOST, but it is less useful in the real world, read that here if you are interested.

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Comments:

Comments: 18

Comment from anonymous
Time: December 11, 2006, 11:25 pm

I think

creates a line break in the prompt, too. It’s not ideal, I guess, but when you’re in a really deep directory, it’s good not to have the prompt all the way on the right edge of the screen, but it’s also nice to see the entire directory without asking (pwd) all the time.

Also play around with

for another time format,

for shell name

for shell version. I am sure there are more, but enjoy!

Comment from nick
Time: December 12, 2006, 8:11 am

I like to update the title of the terminal window as well, so here’s mine as it stands currently:

case $TERM in
xterm* | aterm | rxvt | screen )
XTITLE=”\[\e]0;\u@\h (\w)\a\]” ;;
* )
XTITLE=”" ;;
esac
PS1=”$XTITLE”"[\u@\h:\w]\n\\$ ”

While I’m here and in case anyone uses GNU/screen, it’s worth mentioning: http://dischord.org/blog/2006/11/22/gnuscreen-and-dynamic-titles-for-ssh/

Comment from fak3r
Time: December 12, 2006, 8:23 am

This is not an OS X trick, in fact I post my .bashrc online: http://phil.cryer.us/code/dotfiles/bashrc and use it on FreeBSD/Linux at home, and Solaris, AIX, HP-UX at work. I’ve shared this with many co-workers and friends too, and it’s easy enough to modify if you need to. It gives output like this:

[09:51:54] [uname@hostname ~/home]$

I like having the time on each line, it makes it very easy to deal with logs to compare when an even happened. With 10 terms open having the uname and hostname listed is great, and the path is a standard, but this one truncates so it doesn’t push your $ all the way over to the side. I’ve tweaked this for years, but this is how I use it day to day.

HTH

Comment from Nick
Time: December 12, 2006, 9:17 am

A good PS1 for dark backgrounds, colorful and informative.

PS1=”\n33[1;33m-33[1;34m-(33[1;37m\u33[1;34m@33[1;33m\h33[1;34m)-33[1;33m-33[1;34m-(33[1;33m\w33[1;34m)-33[1;33m-\n\[33[1;33m\]-\[33[1;34m\]-\[33[1;33m\]-#\[33[1;37m\] “

Comment from Nate
Time: December 12, 2006, 10:23 am

This one looks pretty nice (I’ve been using it for years)
export PS1=’\u@\h[\w]\$ ‘

looks like this:
nhart@sectumsempra[/usr]$
where /usr changes to your current dir and the $ changes to # if you are r00t.

Comment from Gary
Time: December 12, 2006, 1:32 pm

Don’t forget to run:

. .bashrc

… to effect the change in your bash session. That’s dot space dot bashrc.

Comment from gid
Time: December 12, 2006, 2:14 pm

I myself am partial to:

PS1=’\u@\h \[\e[33m\]\W\[\e[0m\] \[`if [[ $? = 0 ]]; then echo ‘\'’\e[32m=)\e[0m’\'’; else echo ‘\'’\e[31m=(\e[0m’\'’ ; fi`\] $ ‘

works with linux/bash anyway =)

Pingback from OS X Daily » How to Customize your Terminal Prompt - Mac OS X Apps, Tips, Tricks, News, Updates, Everything Mac OS X : Popular Bookmarks : eConsultant
Time: December 23, 2006, 5:50 pm

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Comment from anonymous
Time: December 30, 2006, 1:24 pm

a very nice article by IBM just reminded me of your site:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-tip-prompt/

Comment from Alpharetta
Time: January 24, 2007, 5:31 pm

!!!! swweetttt

Comment from Strafverteidiger München
Time: April 24, 2007, 12:12 pm

very cool.

Comment from lipitor
Time: May 29, 2007, 9:38 am

Did the LOST prompt. Awesome!

Comment from mel
Time: July 24, 2007, 9:48 pm

I was frustrated until I realized that you have to quit terminal and restart before the customization takes effect. ah…the joys of customization…

Pingback from Top News Apple » How to Customize your Terminal Prompt (OS X)
Time: November 20, 2007, 6:06 am

[…] read more | digg story […]

Comment from mrc
Time: December 4, 2007, 7:58 pm

for whatever reason, it appears that my .bashrc file is not being executed when i start up Terminal. i can set the “run command” for the basic window profile to execute the . .bashrc command to change the prompt, but it seems like it should work automatically. have i missed something?

Comment from Ivan Storck
Time: December 12, 2007, 6:22 am

I’m having the same problem as mrc - it seems like .bashrc is not being executed. I have even quit and restarted Terminal. Any ideas?

Comment from nick
Time: January 29, 2008, 5:29 pm

I had the same problem re: .bashrc not being executed…try making the same edits as above to .bash_profile instead. worked for me.

Comment from Dave
Time: March 12, 2008, 6:55 pm

I’m running Tiger and you can use the same code in your ~/.profile file. I assume this will change only the settings for that user, though.

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