Import That!

I have a mild dislike of Python's default prompt, ">>>". Not that the prompt itself is bad, but when you copy from an interactive session and paste into email or a Usenet post, the prompt clashes with the standard > email quote marker. So I've changed my first level prompt to "py>" to distinguish interactive sessions from email quotes. Doing so is very simple:

import sys
sys.ps1 = 'py> '

Note the space at the end.

You can change the second level prompt (by default, "...") by assigning to sys.ps2, but I haven't bothered. Both prompts support arbitrary objects, not just strings, which you can use to implement dynamic prompts similar to those iPython uses. Here's a simple example of numbering the prompts:

class Prompt:
    def __init__(self):
        self.count = 0
    def __str__(self):
        self.count += 1
        return "[%4d] " % self.count

sys.ps1 = Prompt()

If you're trying to use coloured prompts, there are some subtitles to be aware of. You have to escape any non-printing characters. See this bug report for details.

You can have Python automatically use your custom prompt by setting it your startup file. If the environment variable PYTHONSTARTUPFILE is set, Python will run the file named in that environment variable when you start the interactive interpreter. As I am using Linux for my desktop, I have the following line in my .bashrc file to set the environment variable each time I log in:

export PYTHONSTARTUP=/home/steve/python/startup.py

and the startup file itself then sets the prompt, as shown above.