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:
Here's my Prompt (source), also very simple:
export PS1="\[\033[1;97m\]\u: \[\033[1;94m\]\w \[\033[1;97m\]\$\[\033[0m\] "
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. :)