If you frequently use a shell (bash in my case), it's important to have a decent prompt statement. Modifying PS1 isn't new to a lot of folks, but I thought I'd share mine anyway:
export PS1="[ \[\e[33m\]\u@\h -- \w\[\e[0m\] ]\n? "
Note that this uses color (a yellow-gold, varying slightly from one machine to another) and only looks good with a white-on-black color scheme. The resulting layout is something like this:
[ peter@komodo -- ~/git ]
?
The reason I like using two lines is that my eyes naturally look to the beginning of a line when I start typing. I don't have to scan through the line to find where I am. This is particularly nice if you're deep in a filesystem and your pwd is 60 or 70-some characters long. Along with that, your command isn't wrapped immediately after you start typing. That gets annoying.
In addition to modifying PS1, there are other prompt statements that can be changed, including PS2, PS3, PS4, and PROMPT_COMMAND. I haven't found a need to change these from the defaults, but there's an excellent writeup if you'd like to find out more.