"I find myself in the Python REPL a lot. I open up the REPL to play with an idea, to use Python as a calculator or quick and dirty text parsing tool, to record a screencast, to come up with a code example for an article, and (most importantly for me) to teach Python. My Python courses and workshops are based largely around writing code together to guess how something works, try it out, and repeat."
"If you want to run Python code every time an interactive prompt (a REPL) starts, you can make a PYTHONSTARTUP file. When Python launches an interactive prompt, it checks for a PYTHONSTARTUP environment variable. If it finds one, it treats it as a filename that contains Python code and it runs all the code in that file, as if you had copy-pasted the code into the REPL."
Python's interactive REPL supports customization to streamline interactive coding, teaching, and experimentation. A PYTHONSTARTUP environment variable can point to a Python file that runs automatically when a REPL starts, allowing setup code to execute every session. Shell environment files like ~/.zshenv or ~/.bashrc can set PYTHONSTARTUP; Windows requires setting the environment variable through system settings. Newer Python versions allow adding custom keyboard shortcuts (since 3.13) and customizing REPL syntax highlighting (since 3.14). Mapping keys and defining startup behaviors makes writing, editing, and exploring code in the REPL faster and more editor-like.
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