My bash Profile

Here it is (with some client-relevant stuff deleted).

Far and away the handiest customizations are the short question-mark aliases for history | grep and ps ax | grep.

Update: here's a Pastie where I use both the ? aliases. I try to start Mongrel, but it won't start. I can't remember if I left it running, so I do a ps? mongrel and find out no, it's not running. Then I do a ? mongrel to see what I've done with Mongrel recently.

Obviously this is easy stuff, but compacting it down makes it really quick and fun to use. Also, since it becomes a habit to just hit ? when you want the system to tell you something - which is very intuitive - you have that option even in situations when you're tired from overwork and wouldn't naturally remember something that clever. It kind of turns the clever part invisible.