How to fit docker ps in your screen

Daniel Garcia
tech
December 11, 2025

Introduction

Something that has bugged me for a long time is how the command docker ps represents in my terminal:

Docker ps horrible

As you can see, the output is split between several lines because it does not fit in my screen, and it makes the output super hard to read.

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The solution

Hopefully, docker implemented a solution that allows us to configure this command as we like.

  1. Just open your config.json:

    nano .docker/config.json

    ℹ️ If you don’t have a config.json yet, this command will create it.

  2. Add the following config to it:

    "psFormat": "table {{.ID}}\t{{.Image | printf \"%.20s\"}}\t{{.State}}\t{{.Status}}\t{{.Names}}"

    So that your config looks like this:

    {
 ...whatever you had before...,
  "psFormat": "table {{.ID}}\t{{.Image | printf \"%.20s\"}}\t{{.State}}\t{{.Status}}\t{{.Names}}"
}

  3. Now your docker ps output looks so much better!

Docker ps after

What does this line do and further configuration

Lets analize this code:

"psFormat": "table {{.ID}}\t{{.Image | printf \"%.20s\"}}\t{{.State}}\t{{.Status}}\t{{.Names}}"

Here we say:

  • table {{.ID}} -> Show the ID of the containers
  • {{.Image | printf \"%.20s\"}} -> Show the image name truncated to 20 characters
  • {{.State}} -> Show the state of the containers
  • {{.Status}} -> Show the status of the containers
  • {{.Names}} -> Show the containers’ names

You can customize this however you want, by adding or removing parameters such as:

Container identification

{{.ID}} -> Container ID (short)

{{.Image}} -> Image name

{{.Names}} -> Container name

Runtime / state

{{.Command}} -> Command used to run the container

{{.CreatedAt}} -> Created timestamp (formatted)

{{.RunningFor}} -> Time since creation (human readable)

{{.State}} -> State (created, running, exited…)

{{.Status}} -> Full status (e.g., “Up 5 minutes”)

{{.Ports}} -> Port mappings

Resources & metadata

{{.Size}} -> Size information

{{.Mounts}} -> Mounted volumes

Labels

{{.Labels}} -> All labels

{{.Label "key"}} -> A specific label, e.g. {{.Label "traefik.enable"}}

Networks

{{.Networks}} -> Networks the container is attached to

As you can see, there’s a lot of info we can show and format in our own way to make the docker ps command much more practical.

Tags:
docker