Forwarding Address: OS X

Monday, April 12, 2004

I know I'm way behind the curve, since Python has popped up in many posts here in the past couple years, but I have renewed my acquaintance with this sweet language and am really enjoying it. I'm poring over the standard documentation, Mark Pilgrim's book and parts of the "Think Like a Computer Scientist" book.

I'm sure there are readers out there who are Mac Python ninjas, and I'd love to hear from you in the Quicktopic. I'll share a few tidbits to get things rolling.

One: you can get a nice little search interface to the documentation by doing a "pydoc -g" under X11 (I've got it aliased to Cmd-shift-P in the X11 Applications menu). Two: while command history doesn't seem to work in the Apple-provided build, it works great in the Fink version (promise you won't make me feel like an idiot if there's some easy way to turn this on in the stock binary, or worse if it works by default and I broke it with some shell customization or other...). Three: there are various nifty-looking GUI toolkits, including PyObjC (more than a GUI kit of course) and wxPython. Four: consider creating a .term file that launches the Python interpreter directly, like this one which I keep in ~/Library/Application Support/Terminal/ and open via LaunchBar (change /sw/bin/python to /usr/bin/python if you're using Apple's build).

Discuss