Hide username on Mac terminal prompt

Minimal setups are great when trying to focus. The standard terminal window can get cluttered. In this tutorial, I will show you how to configure your terminal window to go from this:

Cody-MacBook-Pro:~ codybontecou$

to this:

~ $

Edit your terminal config file ​

I'm using zsh as my default shell, but this should be the same if you shell.

1. Edit your .zshrc file
2. Add and/or edit the value PS1.

Here is a cheatsheet to explain the accepted values for the PS1 key/value provided by user3439894 of stackexchange.

PS1='\h:\W \u\$ '

PS1 The value of this parameter is expanded (see PROMPTING below) and used as the primary prompt string.
=   equals
'   single quote
\h  the hostname up to the first ‘.’
:   colon
\W  the basename of the current working directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde
    white space
\u  the username of the current user
\$  if the effective UID is 0, a #, otherwise a $
    white space
'   single quote

Examples:

MacBookPro:~ user$
MacBookPro:Documents user$
MacBookPro:~ root#

My preference ​

I personally use PS1='' within my .zshrc file. This provides a blank prompt which feels good to me. If I ever get lost, I type a quick pwd to see where I am, but I rarely run into that problem.

And cmon, this looks great!