Adding keyboard shortcuts to the Python REPL

submited by

Style Pass

2024-11-05 22:30:13

I’d like to share a secret feature within the Python 3.13 REPL which I’ve been finding useful recently: adding custom keyboard shortcuts.

In other words: _pyrepl is designed to be used by Python’s standard library modules and not anyone else. That means that we should assume this code will break in a future Python version.

So we’ve made one custom key combination for ourselves. How can we setup this command automatically whenever the Python REPL starts?

When Python launches, if it sees a PYTHONSTARTUP environment variable it will treat that environment variable as a Python file to run on startup.

I’ve made a /home/trey/.python_startup.py file and I’ve set this environment variable in my shell’s configuration file (~/.zshrc):

Note that this might still raise an exception when Python starts if the reader object’s command attribute or bind method change in a way that breaks our code.