I'm not able to test the patch at the moment, but since it essentially just uses the recipe in the docs, I expect it will have the same side-effect. Namely, it prevents you using the tab key to indent in the interactive interpreter.

Now I don't know if I'm missing something painfully obvious, but having to bang out space-space-space-space for every indent is surely not going to be a win for usability ;-) Even if I am missing something, surely so will a lot of other users.

I use a readline completer that (in my opinion) does the Right Thing: at the start of the line, hitting TAB inserts a tab, otherwise it does completion. It also sets a history file, adds a couple of key bindings that I sometimes find useful, and wraps it all up in a class. (Attached.) If you think there is any value in this, I'm happy to update it to Python 3.3 and polish it up as a patch to the readline module. Or someone can just mine it for ideas.