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How can I make my Mac terminal look like the screenshot below? The input line is cool and seems useful.

enter image description here

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Belongs on superuser.com – Binary Worrier Aug 27 '09 at 13:21
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Aug 27 '09 at 13:44

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2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

You mean the prompt line? That is done by setting the PS1 environment variable in the .bashrc file (or .bash_profile) in your home directory.

See: http://beckism.com/2009/02/better%5Fbash%5Fprompt/

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lynda.com has a decent lesson on configuring BASH profiles in their Mac UNIX video tutorial. it's not free, but the OP might find it interesting – username Oct 15 '11 at 11:22
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up vote 2 down vote

It seems that the guy in the picture you sent uses Rails and GIT. If you are using git, you should download GIT Bash Completition to and change your .bash_profile, including this 2 lines:

source ~/.git-completion.bash
export PS1='\[\033[38m\]\u@\h\[\033[01;34m\] \w \[\033[31m\]`git branch 2> /dev/null | grep \* | head -1 |  sed "s/\* //g" | awk "{ print \"(\" \\\$1 \")\" }"`\[\033[29m\]$\[\033[00m\] '

With this you will have a nice prompt, which tells you what branch you are.

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Actually the Git completion file provides a ready-made item to export into PS1. They suggest this, for example, PS1='[\u@\h \W$(__git_ps1 " (%s)")]\$ ' – Telemachus Aug 27 '09 at 14:20
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