Thanks to Mic and Glen for sharing your ideas on this! What I came up with is a combo of both your inputs: in ~/.emacs_bash case "$EMACS" in t) export PS1="[\u@\h $(date "+%A, %B %d %Y * %r")\n\w]\$ " export PS2="> " export TERM=gnuemacs stty -echo nl unalias ls ;; esac So far, seems to work fine! Many thanks