Every user wants to setup his own shell to their liking.
Probably setting an EDITOR variable is the most important thing ever.
When I used bash, I setup .bashrc to be like:
EDITOR=mcedit; export EDITOR
Now with zsh, my .zshrc looks like:
# set screen window name (this is really a nice trick if you use screen) if [[ $TERM == "screen" ]]; then preexec() { echo -ne "\033k$1\033\\" } fi EDITOR=mcedit; export EDITOR export PS1='%n@%m:%~%(!.#.$) ' unset RPS1 HISTSIZE=1000 SAVEHIST=1000 HISTFILE=~/.history
People that create Debian packages will also want to set DEBEMAIL and DEBFULLNAME .
Users may also consider sites such as Bashish, which provides a "theme" like infrastructure, and lots of themes.