How do I make the Terminal easier to read and mentally process?

I am beginning to learn to use the shell via macOS's Terminal running Zsh, and I'm finding it difficult to process all of the very tightly packed information in the commands and results.

What are the most common ways to maximize intelligibility in the shell/Terminal?

Two specific customizations I know I'd like to try:

1. How would I set up the shell to always include an extra line or a horizontal rule after each command has finished, to visually separate each command from the previous?

   • From this answer, I ran PS0="\n", which did nothing.
   • From this answer, which took me here, I ran vi .bash_profile from the home directory, which caused my Terminal to freak out with a bunch of lines of just ~ over and over again, so I aborted that.

2. Is there a way to customize the way paths are displayed? e.g. Instead of path/name/example, perhaps path > name > example? For very long paths with spaces in directory names, this would increase legibility to include space between each level.