One of our target audiences for this blog (though certainly not the only one) is people who have recently switched from another operating system to Mac OS X. People who came from the Windows world, especially Windows XP and earlier versions, probably didn’t pay much attention when asked to pick a short username during initial setup, and now maybe you’re sort of regretting that you didn’t pay more attention. Or, maybe you got a working Mac from a friend or relative (or worse yet, an ex-significant other), and you wish that the home directory had your name on it, not theirs. Or, perhaps it’s just that you would like a shorter short username.
Normally we might give you a walk-through on how to do this, but it turns out that there are at least three different approaches you can take to the problem, and there is an article in MacWorld that explains all of them, including the benefits and drawbacks of each approach. So, rather than reinvent the wheel, we’ll just suggest that you head over there and follow their instructions. We would usually prefer the third approach mentioned in that article, even though it’s slightly more complicated, but that’s because we’d probably want to get rid of all traces of the unwanted name.
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