iTerm 2 name length - macos

I am new to OSX and have downloaded iTerm 2 and my name for the command line is superfluously long.
It looks like my-name-Macbook-pro:~ myname$
and I want it to look like ~myname$
Is there an easy way to shorten this name, I have googled as much as I can but can't find an easy solution.

This has nothing to do with OSX or with iterm2. OSX by default uses the bash shell and you just need to set the prompt correctly.
The prompt is set by the variable PS1. See this article on how to set your bash prompt. To achieve what you want, you need the \w and the \u fields. So something like
PS1=\\w:\\u\$
will give you ~:myname$. Play around with the other options and see what you like best. Once you find a setting that you like, enter it in your .bashrc file so that it is loaded every time you login. Also see this question for cool stuff to put in your .bashrc.

Related

Globally Map "Escape Key" to "jj" in vim (mac)

I have been using vim for awhile but I have not been able to figure out how to map the escape globally - every time I open a file, I have to map the escape key to jj like this:
:imap jj <Esc>
Is there a way to change the runtime defaults so that Esc is already mapped to jj?
I found the default.vim file, but you cannot edit it on a mac (with standard mac software). Should I download something to edit this file? Is there another easier way?
Any help is much appreciated!
The place for your local changes is called .vimrc and you typically create one in your home directory with the commands you want to execute on startup.
Run vimtutor on the (system) command line and spend a few minutes learning how to use this editor. Then dig into the facilities provided by :help in Vim. E.g. run :help vimrc in Vim.

how do you enable command line editing with vim keys using mac terminal?

I'm reading this book and I really do not understand what this author is talking about. It appears that you can program your mac to go forward one character by either hitting l or ^F. I do not understand the difference between emac key stroke and vim keystroke. He also says run this command and 'place it in your $HOME/.bash_profile but I cannot figure out how to place the command in the bas_profile.
The Author is talking about make you terminal console behaves like vi, this means typing set -o vi in your terminal, the console will work similar vi. So you will be able to navigate using the motion keys of vi, use INSERT mode, x to delete, etc.
You can set that permanently if you include this command in your ~/.bash_profile file.
If you are not sure what it does, I don't recommend so.

Why is my mac terminal acting buggy when I use the up arrow key?

I normally use the up arrow key to scroll through previous commands in my terminal. I've noticed that over the past few months, when I do this, I do not get previous commands but instead a 'buggy behavior'. For example, when I press the up arrows key, it might enter gibberish and apparently random spaces and a small part of my command. Does anybody have any ideas as to what might be causing this? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work. It's starting to get very annoying. (fyi, I'm using yosemite and osx if that has any relevance)
I know this is an old question, but I recently had the same issue. The problem is likely your PS1 prompt. You may not be fully enclosing your non-printing characters with \[ ... \]
To solve:
in your terminal echo $PS1 - this will show you your current PS1 setting.
Make sure that any options (such as color options) are enclosed by \[ and \] and set it. e.g. PS1='\[\e[95m\]\u \[\e[93m\]\w:\[\e[92m\]\$'
Save your new PS1 permanently in your .bash_profile or wherever you keep your bash settings.
Example:
My faulty PS1 was \[\e[95m\]\u \[\e[93m\]\w: \e[92m\]\$
I was missing the opening encloser, \[ after the \w:
My corrected PS1 is \[\e[95m\]\u \[\e[93m\]\w:\[\e[92m\]\$
In my case, the up-arrow stopped working properly for me in OSX shortly after I changed my .bashrc to use "HISTSIZE=-1". My unconfirmed guess is that the bash version is too old to handle the -1 option, so bash stopped recording a history entirely. My up-arrow key was being interpreted correctly, but there was no history to retrieve. Once I changed my HISTSIZE, the up-arrow (and the history command) in new terminals started working again.
To be clear, I can't say if your problem is from the same cause. I don't recall getting gibberish in the history, though I did see some odd behavior such as an errant "." somehow appearing in ls commands. Still, if someone is having problems with using the up-arrow to retrieve previous bash commands, it seems worth a shot. Try checking your HISTSIZE setting, and/or invoke the history command directly, to make sure that you have a history for the up-arrow to retrieve.
I've had this problem for a while myself on my work computer I was able to resolve it when changed from ksh shell to the bash shell.
I'd recommend this Lynda course it explains most of what you need but simply type bash to change shell.
https://www.lynda.com/Mac-OS-tutorials/Unix-Mac-OS-X-Users/78546-2.html

Terminal shows "?

I was editing .bash_profile and after I saved it ,terminal shows nothing.How can I reset it to previous mode.This is how it looks now.
I changed the value of PS1 variable.I don't have any knowledge about terminal.Please help.
The PS1 environment variable defines what the bash prompt looks like. The default varies among distros, but is generally something like this:
PS1='\h:\W \u\$ '
The bash manpage has an explanation of PS1 values under the heading "Prompting".
You can apply PS1 values to your current terminal session by pressing Control+C several times, then pasting in the line of code above and pressing return or enter. That should get your environment behaving normally long enough to edit your bash profile unless something else is wrong.
If something else is wrong with your profile, and bash is completely broken, you can temporarily use a different shell (one that doesn't care about your bash_profile) with the "New Command..." option in Terminal.app's file menu. When prompted for a command, enter /bin/zsh. You should then get a usable terminal window which you can use to edit or move your .bash_profile.

Zsh tab completion duplicating command name

I'm on OS X Mountain Lion, running the included ZSH shell (4.3.11) with Oh-My-ZSH installed over the top.
When using tab completion with commands such as homebrew, when ZSH lists the available commands, it is also duplicating the command. For example:
$ brew {tab}
will result in:
$ brew brew
[list of homebrew commands]
I'm unsure what is causing this error, as when I resize the terminal window, the first instance of the command name disappears.
If I hit backspace when the duplicates are displayed, I can only delete the second instance of the command, zsh won't let me backspace any further. Also, if I do remove the duplicate with backspace, zsh then acts as if there is no command typed at all.
My .zshrc along with all my other .configuration files can be found at https://github.com/daviesjamie/dotfiles
UPDATE: I found this post about someone having the same problem on Ubuntu. However, I don't understand the given solution, and I'm not even sure if it applies to my set up?
This effect also could be reproduced if you use any of fancy UTF-8 characters like arrow, "git branch" character and so on.
Just remove this chars from prompt and duplication will not occur.
Also adding
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
to ~/.profile can help
The problem is likely to arise from misplaced %{ %} brackets that tell zsh that text inside has zero width. The only things that should be enclosed in them are escape sequences that change color or boldness of the text. If you are using new zsh (>=4.3.{unknown version}) I would even suggest to use %F{color}...%f, %K{color}...%k, %B...%b instead of %{${fg[green]}%} or what you have there.
The problem with them is that there is no way to query the terminal with a question like “Hey, I outputted some text. Where is the cursor now?” and zsh has to compute the length of its prompt by itself. When you type some text and ask zsh to complete zsh will say terminal to move cursor to specific location and type completed cmdline there. With misplaced %{%} brackets this specific location is wrong.
If you use iTerm on Mac, be sure to check "Set locale variables automatically" in your profile preferences. I had it unchecked for an SSH connection and it resulted in the same bug and I fixed it by leaving that option checked.
It's an old thread but I faced similar issue in my zsh setup with oh-my-zsh configuration.
Setting export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 fixed the issue.
A lot of answers in a lot of places suggest the export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 solution. This, however did not work for me. I continued to have this issue using oh-my-zsh on both Arch linux and PopOS.
The only solution that worked for me was this suggestion by romkatv on an issue on the oh-my-zsh github repository.
It turns out, at least in my case, that the autocomplete duplication issue would only show up if there was a non-ASCII character somewhere on the line (like an emoji). And ZSH would incorrectly assume that this non-ASCII character needs to take up 2 character spaces instead of 1.
So the solution that worked was to open up the .zsh-theme file of whatever theme you're using, find all non-ASCII characters and use %{%G%} to tell ZSH to only use one character width for that character
For example, the default oh-my-zsh theme robbyrussel contains 2 non-ASCII characters. The '➜' character in the prompt
PROMPT="%(?:%{$fg_bold[green]%}➜ :%{$fg_bold[red]%}➜ )"
and the '✗' character in the prompt for git directories
ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_DIRTY="%{$fg[blue]%}) %{$fg[yellow]%}✗"
Using %{%G<character>%} around the 2 non-ASCII characters like this
PROMPT="%(?:%{$fg_bold[green]%}%{%G➜%} :%{$fg_bold[red]%}%{%G➜%} )"
and this
ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_DIRTY="%{$fg[blue]%}) %{$fg[yellow]%}%{%G✗%}"
is what finally fixed the issue for me.
So all you need to do is make a copy of the theme file you want to use and edit all the non-ASCII characters as shown above and you should hopefully never see the duplication issue again.
My solution to make both local and ssh work is something like a combination of #Marc's and #neotohin's answers:
Set export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 (simply uncomment that part in the template .zshrc; exporting LC_ALL, as in #neotohin's answer, instead of LANG may also work, I didn't try)
Uncheck "Set locale environment variables on startup" in the Terminal profile's "Advanced" section (reason: that setting sets LC_CTYPE=UTF-8 instead of en_US.UTF-8, which brakes the locale for me in ssh)

Resources