fourteen interactive input editing and history substitution some versions of the python interpreter support editing of the current input line and history substitutionsimilar to facilities found in the korn shell and the gnu bash shell this is implemented using the gnu readline librarywhich supports various styles of editing this library has its own documentation which we won' duplicate here tab completion and history editing completion of variable and module names is automatically enabled at interpreter startup so that the tab key invokes the completion functionit looks at python statement namesthe current local variablesand the available module names for dotted expressions such as string ait will evaluate the expression up to the final and then suggest completions from the attributes of the resulting object note that this may execute application-defined code if an object with __getattr__(method is part of the expression the default configuration also saves your history into file named python_history in your user directory the history will be available again during the next interactive interpreter session alternatives to the interactive interpreter this facility is an enormous step forward compared to earlier versions of the interpreterhoweversome wishes are leftit would be nice if the proper indentation were suggested on continuation lines (the parser knows if an indent token is required nextthe completion mechanism might use the interpreter' symbol table command to check (or even suggestmatching parenthesesquotesetc would also be useful one alternative enhanced interactive interpreter that has been around for quite some time is ipythonwhich features tab completionobject exploration and advanced history management it can also be thoroughly customized and embedded into other applications another similar enhanced interactive environment is bpython