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.

As a personal reminder, here's how to install PIL with jpeg and freetype support in a Python virtualenv with a little help from Homebrew:

$ brew install jpeg
$ wget http://mirrors.fe.up.pt/pub/nongnu/freetype/freetype-2.4.4.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf freetype-2.4.4.tar.gz && cd freetype-2.4.4
$ ./configure && make && sudo make install
$ cd .. && rm -rf freetype-2.4.4*
$ mkvirtualenv fubar --no-site-packages
(fubar)$ pip install PIL

You should obtain something like this at the end of the installation process:

--------------------------------------------------------------------
PIL 1.1.7 SETUP SUMMARY
--------------------------------------------------------------------
version       1.1.7
platform      darwin 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Jun 24 2010, 21:47:49)
              [GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
--- TKINTER support available
--- JPEG support available
--- ZLIB (PNG/ZIP) support available
--- FREETYPE2 support available
*** LITTLECMS support not available
--------------------------------------------------------------------

That's all for today folks, thanks for your attention.

EDIT: If you want little-cms support, just run:

$ brew install little-cms
(fubar)$ pip install PIL