Shells tightly bound to directory?

I am noticing a pattern: I have long used emacs shell windows. But for some reasion more and more I am creating shell windows that are intended to be tightly bound to their directory. Whose name is their directiry. Where it gets confusing if I chdir in them. In fact, have had errors when I quickly type keystrokes to switch to a shell window command expecting to be in dir PROBLEM: had changed away from dir, deliberately or by accident I am beginning to wonder about DISABLING chdir in that sort of shell window. Or at least making it a bit more onerous. Why this is happening more now than in the past, I dunno. Possibly because I have more screens. --- Similar happens for xterms, but I use xterms much less often than I use emacs shell windows.