How to suppress (or customize) Mac Terminal shell prompt

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:

Simple Terminal Prompt

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

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

enter image description here


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.


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