(Work in progress. Many things work, but APIs can change.)

prompt_toolkit is a Library for building powerful interactive command lines in Python. It ships with a nice interative Python shell built on top of the library.

prompt_toolkit can be a replacement for readline.

Features:

• Pure Python.
• Syntax highlighting of the input while typing. (For instance, with a Pygments lexer.)
• Multiline input editing
• Advanced code completion
• Both Emacs and Vi keybindings (Similar to readline)
• Reverse and forward incremental search
• Both Python 3 and Python 2.7 support
• Works well with Unicode double width characters. (Chinese input.)
• Code written with love.

Limitations:

• Only for vt100-compatible terminals. (Actually, all terminals in OS X and Linux systems are VT100 compatible the days, so that should not be an issue. There is no Windows support, however.)

pip install prompt-toolkit 

Run ptpython to get an interactive Python prompt with syntaxt highlighting, code completion, etc...

If you prefer to have Vi keybindings (which currently are more completely implemented than the Emacs bindings), run ptpython --vi.

If you want to embed the repl inside your application at one point, do:

from prompt_toolkit.contrib.repl import embed embed(globals(), locals(), vi_mode=False, history_filename=None)

Tab and shift+tab complete the input. (Thanks to the Jedi autocompletion library.) In Vi-mode, you can also use Ctrl+N and Ctrl+P.

Usually, multiline editing mode will automatically turn on when you press enter after a colon, however you can always turn it on by pressing F7.

To execute the input in multiline mode, you can either press Alt+Enter, or Esc followed by Enter. (If you want the first to work in the OS X terminal, you have to check the "Use option as meta key" checkbox in your terminal settings.)

This is a library which allows you to build highly customizable input prompts. Every step (from key bindings, to line behaviour until the renderer can be customized.)

A simple example looks like this:

from prompt_toolkit import CommandLine, AbortAction from prompt_toolkit.line import Exit def main(): # Create CommandLine instance cli = CommandLine() try: while True: code_obj = cli.read_input(on_exit=AbortAction.RAISE_EXCEPTION) print('You said: ' + code_obj.text) except Exit: # Quit on Ctrl-D keypress return if __name__ == '__main__': main()