Cleaning up the Terminal.app prompt

The default settings on macOS’s Terminal.app show the last login and the name of the computer at the prompt line. With some simple adjustments, we can have a cleaner looking Terminal prompt.

Remove the last login message

1. Open Terminal.app
2. Navigate to your base user directory by entering cd ~/.
3. Enter touch .hushlogin. This creates an invisible file called hughlogin.

Remove computer name from the prompt

1. Navigate to your home directory. Enter cd ~/ and type sudo vim .bash_profile.
2. If .bash_profile doesn’t exist, you can type touch .bash_profile to create the file.
3. Enter your user password if requested. When you’re typing the password, you’ll be unable to see the characters.
4. Now vim is open. It’s a shell based text editing application.
5. Hit i to enter edit mode.
6. Copy and paste export PS1="\W \$". This will change the prompt to show $. You can change this to whatever you’d like.
7. Hit the Esc key to exit edit mode.
8. Type :wq! to tell vim that you want to write the changes and quit.
9. Quit and reopen Terminal.app. You should now have $ as your prompt.