Make MacOS Terminal prompt look colorful like Ubuntu

Switching from Ubuntu's colorful bash terminal to the bland monochrome z-shell on MacOS can be underwhelming. All that white makes it hard to distinguish one command run from the other when you're firing dozens of commands in a day.

Here's how to paint some colors on that terminal prompt to make it look similar to the bash terminal on Ubuntu.

Open (or create) ~/.zshrc in your home directory and add the following line:

PROMPT='%F{green}%n%f:%F{cyan}%2~%f$ '

Restart your terminal (or run source ~/.zshrc) and the prompt will turn into a green username, a cyan path, and a plain $ to type after.

Quick breakdown of what the snippet says:

• %F{green}...%f switches the foreground color on, and %f switches it back off.
• %n prints your username.
• %2~ prints the current directory, abbreviating $HOME to ~ and showing only the last 2 segments of the path.

You can mix and match these to taste: swap colors, add the hostname with %m, or show the full path with %~. The complete reference is in the zsh prompt expansion docs.

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