For a basic shell prompt, I personally like having certain things. I suppose thats the whole point of customising your prompt. A few things I like to see includes a timestamp, the current path, and some sort of account identification. I set mine up in the traditional user@host. I guess that part isn't so important if you work entirely locally, but for some of us, it's nice to know where we are...

For those of us who don't know, a good place to define your PS? variables in is your ~/.bashrc dotfile. My personal prompt is this:

This prompt turns out looking like so:

Now I also have this prompt set up for my root user, but I made it red so that I KNOW when I'm su...

For work, I find myself commonly using a variety of machines. I have 2 other variants to switch things up a bit and to help me keep track of what I'm working on. Consider this a bit of variety.