How to Customize Mac Terminal Startup Screen Message

[Mac only] Mac’s Terminal startup message is also called MOTD (Message of The Day). If you have not tweak the startup message, it’s probably blank. To make the Terminal screen a little more interesting whenever you launch the Terminal, here’s how you can put any message, or even ASCII art. Guide after jump.

First of all, you must have root access to the Mac machine you are changing, then follow these following steps:

1. Launch Terminal application
2. Execute this command: sudo pico /etc/motd, password is required
3. Type in your message, save it with Control-X.

To make your message more interesting, try using ASCII art. I recommend this website to generate ASCII art – ascii.mastervb.net