Currently, cctbx.python behaves like described in this stackoverflow post:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/893053/seeing-escape-characters-when-pressing-the-arrow-keys-in-python-shell. I am missing the convenience of backspace delete, which is available on /usr/bin/python interactive sessions. Could that feature be added during compilation of the pre-built cctbx distributions?

Regards.

Wolfram Tempel