Linux Magazine's Editor-in-Chief, Martin Streicher, outlines the various ways of customizing your favorite shell. Most users tend to take the shell as it is without knowing that you can customize it according to your needs. You can assign aliases to frequently used commands, e.g., "ll" as a shortcut to "ls -l". Simple things like this makes life easier for you.

So, maybe you can share your own personal shell customizations to everyone, what do you say?