Message 86632 - Python tracker (original) (raw)

What would be the right place for this to happen? I first thought of site.py, but -S would then turn off readline support. Does it have to be done somewhere in C land?

But perhaps tab isn’t the right key to bind. I think inputrc could set it to something different, perhaps shell rc files too. Is there an API to get this setting, does readline.so already do the right thing, or does it have to be added?

Moreover, in my PYTHONSTARTUP I not only bind tab to complete, but also set a history file. Should this be automatic too? UNIX rules would suggest a standard ~/.pyhistory file, or we could follow newer freedesktop.org specifications [1].

So, I don’t know the history and choices behind readline.so, but from a user point of view, being fed up with lack of tab completion finally had me put up a PYTHONSTARTUP file with these settings, and then some useful functions, and so on. This lack of completion was ultimately a good thing for me. Still, completion could be made to work out of the box, and the man page could link to the doc explaining how to customize this behavior.

[1] XDG Base Directory Specification: http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

Cheers, Merwok