Bash doesn't actually handle the syntax highlighting in those cases, it's all done by the interpreter itself. You'll need to either modify your interpreter thr

Bash doesn't actually handle the syntax highlighting in those cases, it's all done by the interpreter itself. You'll need to either modify your interpreter through a plugin or replace it. For Python, check out bpython [1]. If you don't mind using a graphical program for your interactive REPL, check out DreamPie [2] or the newish GUI version of ipython [3], which is a bit of a bear to install, unfortunately. I don't think the command-line version of ipython supports syntax highlighting, but I'd love to be wrong about that. I'm not really qualified to talk about Standard ML as my experience with it have been primarily in Emacs rather than the REPL. [1] http://bpython-interpreter.org/ http://bpython-interpreter.org/ [2] http://dreampie.sourceforge.net/ http://dreampie.sourceforge.net/ [3] http://ipython.org/ http://ipython.org/