I rarely use python interactively. Nevertheless, when using it, it’s nice to have features like command history. For the standard python interpreter, you need to add some extra configuration.

I also installed iPython lately in order to use it with matplotlib. matplotlib is available per macports for all the MAC users out there. Matplotlib tutorials suggested iPython so I installed it. Anyways, iPython already includes some neat features from the start and in my opinion some clever tab behavior. Tab on start creates tabs for python indentation, but given some typed text it will do tab completion. Very convenient.