Akei : Ingénierie et Développement Web, Conseil, Formation, Symfony, Django

Python is awesome, and so is its native interactive interpreter. I discovered today that it can even provide autocompletion using a very simple trick:

# in your ~/.profile
export PYTHONSTARTUP=$HOME/.pythonrc.py

# in a new ~/.pythonrc.py file
try:
    import readline
except ImportError:
    print("Module readline not available.")
else:
    import rlcompleter
    readline.parse_and_bind("tab: complete")

Note: Don't forget to source your .profile with $ source ~/.profile.

Magic? Well if like me you're running Mac OS X, it won't work, no autocompletion, nada. OS X seems to ship with a very poor (and obsolete) python, and no readline implementation — which is mandatory to achieve our purpose. I even tried to install readline by its own, but it won't solve the problem.

So while being at tweaking up my python setup, let me get rid of the Apple stuff and install a fresh version of python using Homebrew, a great package manager for OSX:

$ brew install readline python

Tadaa! Now you get autocompletion, plus a shiny python 2.7.1 (you could also install latest python3 running brew install python3 by the way).

As a side note, if you work with virtualenvs like me, creating a new env will now involve specifying which python you want to use:

$ mkvirtualenv -p /usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.1/bin/python \
    --no-site-packages `pwd`/env

That's all folks.