Disclaimer: this comment includes a shameless plug to something I wrote. Read further only if you are not offended by this behavior. I am just trying to help ot

Disclaimer: this comment includes a shameless plug to something I wrote. Read further only if you are not offended by this behavior. I am just trying to help others reading this post who like me think IPython might be a bit of an overkill at times but aren't really happy with the default python prompt. Now my comment ... This Looks really nice and it does seem like it adds a lot to IPython. That said, I personally prefer working in a proper editor (rather than an approximation) when doing multi-line editing of commands on the prompt. So I wrote a small function to just invoke the editor with the lines in the current prompt 'buffer'[1]. This gives all the things like autocomplete and syntax-highlighting for free (albeit, when you are in the editor). Further more you may open up other buffers to refer to other code while editing the thing that you are on your prompt. To see what I mean -- https://gist.github.com/lonetwin/5902720 https://gist.github.com/lonetwin/5902720 Furthermore, what I wrote is a small enough file to copy as a .pythonrc (rather than pip install ...). [1] ...and then I added more ...a lot more.