Question

I’m trying to get the behaviour of typical IM clients that use Return to send a text and Shift + Return to insert a linebreak. Is there a way to achieve that with minimal effort in Python, using e.g. readline and raw_input?

Answer 1

Ok, I heard it can be accomplished also with the readline, in a way.

You can import readline and set in configuration your desired key (Shift+Enter) to a macro that put some special char to the end of the line and newline. Then you can call raw_input in a loop.

Like this:

import readline    
# I am using Ctrl+K to insert line break 
# (dont know what symbol is for shift+enter)
readline.parse_and_bind('C-k: "#\n"')
text = []
line = "#"
while line and line[-1]=='#':
  line = raw_input("> ")
  if line.endswith("#"):
    text.append(line[:-1])
  else:
    text.append(line)

# all lines are in "text" list variable
print "\n".join(text)