I don't know about anyone else, but when transitioning back to a shell, I HAVE to hit a bunch of enters on any prompt to clear the last output away a few lines before I can summon up the powers to enter a new command - blow away the cobwebs and all that. I love the empty enter command line :)

I'm the same way, and "clear" or ^L isn't what I'm after. I want the history to still be on my screen, but I want the vertical separation too.

Sounds like a good use case for `clear`.