What are some good shell tweaks?

A short while ago, I saw a blog post from someone about modernizing their shell. Unfortunately, I lost the blog post, but there was some really good stuff in there. Just mentioning this in case someone knows what I'm talking about.

One tweak I remember they mentioned was about fixing programs that have broken formatting. It prevents scenarios like

    
user@hostname:~$ echo "hi"
hiuser@hostname:-~$


  

where the output and shell prompt get placed on the same line. I noticed this happens with bash with C programs that don't include a \n in the final printf statement.