This is pyrepl, a readline-a-like in Python.

It requires python 2.7 (or newer) and features:

• sane multi-line editing
• history, with incremental search
• completion, including displaying of available options
• a fairly large subset of the readline emacs-mode keybindings (adding more is mostly just a matter of typing)
• a liberal, Python-style, license
• a new python top-level
• no global variables, so you can run two or more independent readers without having their histories interfering.
• no hogging of control -- it should be easy to integrate pyrepl into YOUR application's event loop.
• generally speaking, a much more interactive experience than readline (it's a bit like a cross between readline and emacs's mini-buffer)
• unicode support (given terminal support)

There are probably still a few little bugs & misfeatures, but I like it, and use it as my python top-level most of the time.

To get a feel for it, just execute:

$ python pythoni

(One point that may confuse: because the arrow keys are used to move up and down in the command currently being edited, you need to use ^P and ^N to move through the history)

If you like what you see, you can install it with the familiar

$ python setup.py install

which will also install the above "pythoni" script.

summary

Summary of 0.8.4:

• python3 support
• support for more readline hooks
• backport various fixes from pypy
• gracefully break on sys.stdout.close()

Summary of 0.8.3:

• First release from new home on bitbucket.
• Various fixes to pyrepl.readline.
• Allow pyrepl to run if unicodedata is unimportable.

Summary of 0.8.2:

• This is the same version which is distributed with PyPy 1.4, which uses it as its default interactive interpreter:

  • have the possibility of having a "CPython-like" prompt, with ">>>" as PS1 and "..." as PS2

  • add the pyrepl.readline module, which exposes a subset of CPython's readline implemented on top of pyrepl

• Add support for colored completions: see e.g. fancycomplete: http://bitbucket.org/antocuni/fancycompleter

Summary of 0.8.1:

• Fixes
  • in the area of unbound keys and unknown commands
  • in quoted-insert
  • in unicode support
• make Reader and subclasses new-style classes
  • needed to slightly change the way keymaps are built
  • make the inheritance hierachy look like this
    • Turns out I've been wanting new-style classes since before they existed!

                     Reader
                    /      \
      HistoricalReader   CompletingReader
                    \      /
                PythonicReader

Summary of 0.8.0:

• A whole bundle of things.
  • unicode support (although working out what encoding the terminal is using can be "tricky")
  • internal rearchitecting
  • probably a bunch of new bugs...
• Development and web-presence moved to codespeak.net

Summary of new stuff in 0.7.1:

• A non-broken setup.py...

Summary of new stuff in 0.7.0:

• Moved to a package architecture.
• Wrote a (very simple!) distutils setup.py script.
• Changed the keyspec format to be more sensible. See the docstring in pyrepl/keymap.py for more information.
• Portability fixes.
• Various tortuous changes to use 2.2 features where possible but retaining 2.1 support (I hope; haven't got a 2.1 here to test with).
• Jumping up and down on control-C now shouldn't dump you out of pyrepl (via a large hammer kind of approach).
• Bug fixes, particularly in the history handling stuff.
• reader.Reader has a new method, bind(), intended to be used by the user.
• Changes to the init file handling.
• Sundry code reorganization. Libraries built on top of pyrepl will probably require small modifications (but I'm not sure anyone has written any of these yet!).
• A prototypical pygame console.

Other versions summary

see CHANGES for more details and older news