How to Change Username and Home Folder on macOS

by Rian

Choosing the right username can never be more important now than it did before. If your journey in computing started in some computing center with UNIX, no doubt the importance of 3 characters-long username hasn’t escaped you. Whereas, if you started your computing with a PC like I did, a proper or useful username is likely an alien concept. On POSIX systems, it’s a simple enough concept to either change the username (if system allows) or simply transfer over to the newly created account.

Preface

On Macs, the change itself is rather instantaneous, but it is not as streamlined as it appears. I did not encounter any system-breaking issues myself, but some apps did need to be reinstalled to work properly. Not all Macs are affected the same way, so it’s hard to suggest how big of an impact this will have on your computer.

This is the list of issues I’ve encountered so far. Some of them only happened on an Intel machine, while the others affected both Intel and Apple Silicon:

  • Wallpaper will not carry over.
  • OmniFocus cannot be called from Shortcuts. (reinstalled to fix)
  • Firefox extensions are broken. (likewise)
  • PyEnv and Python 3.12.0. (likewise)

Instructions

Again, the principle idea is same for both macOS and Linux. Either have another administrator account change the username, or create a new account and carry the contents over.

  1. Create a temporary admin account.
  2. From the temporary account, change home folder name for the old account.
  3. In System Settings, Under Users & Groups > Old Account’s advanced option, update username and home folder path.
  4. (opt.) Create symlink from old home folder to new home folder to help with the compatibility of some apps.
  5. Reboot and remove the temporary admin account.

Afterthought

I was putting this project off for the longest time. It was a bad habit of mine, deciding a username on the go on every fresh install or a new machine. It’s also a great way to cope with bad usernames IT assigns to people. My point is, it’s better to think twice before creating a username. It might stick around longer than you might imagine.

– How-to /

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