I use some scripts around screen (and tmux would do the job at least as well, just haven't had reason enough to switch) to manage contexts for my shells. The k

I use some scripts around screen (and tmux would do the job at least as well, just haven't had reason enough to switch) to manage contexts for my shells. The key is that that process will be the parent of any shells I spawn in contained windows, and so if I set an environment variable (I use SESSION) before kicking off screen it will be inherited, and visible in my bashrc. This lets me set up a lot of context specific things - path and functions and aliases - but the single best thing about it is a separate bash history per context.