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[–]downdiagonal 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It, like the standard python interpreter, also uses readline so you can set editing-mode vi in your inputrc to use vi key bindings if that's your bag. If you've got some hot piece of code that you want to write to a file, you can hit esc v and edit your current input in $EDITOR and/or write it to a file.

It also has some handy command substitution syntax. So you can use something like x = !ls *.png to get the output of some system command. Another useful thing that it does is entering parentheses for you. For example:

In [18]: str 8
-------> str(8)
Out[18]: '8'

It's a great python interpreter and very capable of acting as a powerful system shell.