I find aliases and extensive dotfiles counterproductive. The first thing I do on a new machine is tweak my profile to alias 'cp', 'mv' and 'rm' to prompt me be

I find aliases and extensive dotfiles counterproductive. The first thing I do on a new machine is tweak my profile to alias 'cp', 'mv' and 'rm' to prompt me before performing destructive operations, and to be verbose about what they're doing. Doing this has saved me from myself several times. While I'm there I usually also set 'ls' to use colored output, since I like to have an easy at-a-glance way to know what it's showing me. The second thing I do is tweak the prompt to include the current time, so I can scroll back and find out when I did things, or see how long things took without having to use explicit timing commands. Doing this has also been helpful on multiple occasions. After that I go set EDITOR, set HISTCONTROL how I want it, and usually set up a couple other files which get sourced by the main profile, in order to set up tool- or API-specific env stuff. This does end up producing a fair bit of stuff in those "dotfiles" you dislike, but I find it to be a quite useful approach.