There are a couple of places on your Mac where your name – or some other name – might appear: the account name and Home folder. The name that appears is based on the Full Name you gave when you (or the administrator) first set up the account.
But what if you want to change your username as it appears in these locations? It’s possible that you have since married and now have a new name (or you just divorced). Maybe IT misspelt your name when they set up your Mac. Perhaps your initial and surname spell something offensive, or it might be time to change what was once an amusing username for something more formal. Maybe your current short name isn’t really short and is a pain to type every time you’re prompted for your username. Perhaps you’ve got two or more Macs and you want to use the same short username on all of them. Or maybe you inherited a Mac and would prefer to just change the name of the existing account rather than create a new one.
Luckily, since Mac OS X Leopard launched in 2007, Apple has made it reasonably simple to change the short username and Home folder name from within System Preferences. Prior to Leopard, changing your short username was a complicated, risky procedure.
There are still a few limitations though:
If you need to create a new administrator account follow these steps:
If you have forgotten your password read: How to recover a forgotten Mac password.
Alternatively you can make an existing account an administrator.
Now that you have set up this alternative administrator account it’s simple to change the user name for your account. But you will see a pretty stark warning that changing the settings might damage the account and prevent you from logging in, so do be cautious!
Advanced Options for a user account lets you change the account’s display name (Full name) and path to the user’s directory.
The first thing to do is log out of your account and into this new administrator account:
Now you are all set to change the username of your usual account. Follow these steps to change the username:
Foundry
This will only change the username – not the Home directory name, or your Short Name. And, as the warning states, it may damage the account and prevent you from logging in!
We did it without any problems, although there were a few hair-raising seconds when the login process took slightly longer than usual.
Changing your Home folder name (and your account name, which is linked – and as you can see in the image above, grayed out) is more complicated.
As before you have to be logged out of the account to be able to change it. So if you aren’t already in the separate admin account log into that.
Here’s how to change your Home folder name and Account name:
Having changed your Home folder name you now need to change your Username – if you don’t there will be problems because the two need the same name. You also need to change the name in the field what shows the location of the Home directory.
If you have any problems logging in check that the account and one directory names are the same.
Need to change your admin password? Here’s How to change the admin password on a Mac.
You may also want to make logging onto your Mac even easier – did you know if you have an Apple Watch you can use that to log on automatically? Here’s how to unlock and log on to your Mac with an Apple Watch.
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Macworld editor since 2008, Karen has worked on both sides of the Apple divide, clocking up a number of years at Apple's PR agency prior to joining Macworld almost two decades ago.
Karen's career highlights include interviewing Apple's Steve Wozniak and discussing Steve Jobs’ legacy on the BBC. Her focus is Mac, but she lives and breathes Apple.
Macworld editor since 2008, Karen has worked on both sides of the Apple divide, clocking up a number of years at Apple's PR agency prior to joining Macworld almost two decades ago.
Karen's career highlights include interviewing Apple's Steve Wozniak and discussing Steve Jobs’ legacy on the BBC. Her focus is Mac, but she lives and breathes Apple.
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