Custom command prompt in Terminal

I prefer a simple command prompt, but the default one is pretty ugly: user name, computer name and folder before every command. A simple $ is enough to tell me where to type.

munawar@MacBook-Pro ~ % 

macOS today: zsh

When I wrote this in 2017, macOS used bash. Since macOS Catalina (2019) the default shell is zsh, which reads its settings from ~/.zshrc.

Open the file in nano:

nano ~/.zshrc

Add this line:

PROMPT='$ '

Save with Control + O and Enter, then exit with Control + X. Reload the settings:

source ~/.zshrc

bash (macOS before 2019, and most Linux)

This is what the original post did. The setting goes in ~/.bash_profile on macOS, or ~/.bashrc on most Linux systems:

nano ~/.bash_profile

export PS1="$ "

source ~/.bash_profile

The 2017 post opened the file with sudo nano. You don't need sudo: the file is in your own home folder, and editing it as root can leave it owned by root, so your user can't change it later.

$ 

Going a bit further

A plain $ hides which folder you are in. If you miss that, show just the current folder name:

# zsh
PROMPT='%1~ $ '

# bash
export PS1='\W $ '

You can go as creative as you like by changing the text in quotes. Tools like Starship give you a fancy prompt with Git status and more, but for me, short and quiet still wins.