Don't Have a Boring Terminal, Personalize It!

This is your playground, make your bash session personal! Customize your terminal and command the Command Line user Interface (CLI)!

Make it pretty. Make it fun. Make it yours…

Maximize its Functionality

.bash_profile

If you’re using a Mac, you’d modify your .bash_profile.

.bashrc

If you’re running on Linux, modify your .bashrc.

Example

There are endless ways of customizing your terminal, from colors to aliases, to my favorite having a custom prompt layout with environmental variables. You can find some examples here, here, and here.

I for instance, have my prompt tell my where I am at! It’s always a good idea to know where you are when entering commands, so I decided to permanently added it to each prompt line (instead of interrupting my workflow to pwd). I also differentiate my user and current location using ANSI colors (though the shell example below doesn’t reflect my colors – cause it doesn’t have my custom .bashrc* file 😉).

breton [~] $ cd Dropbox/Development/
breton [Development] $
breton [Development] $ cd Gists/
breton [Gists] $

This is also a great idea when you are constantly login into multiple servers all the time.

breton [~] $ ssh server
breton@server [~] $