I recently switched from Matlab to Numpy and love it. However, one really great thing I liked about Matlab was the ability to complete commands. There are two ways that it does this:
1) tab completion. If I have a function called foobar(...), I can do 'fo' and it will automatically fill in 'foobar'
2) "up-button" completion (I'm not sure what to call this). If I recently entered a command such as 
'x = linspace(0, 1, 100); A = eye(50);'
and then I wish to quickly type in this same command so that I can re-evaluate it or change it slightly, then I simply type 'x =' then press up and it will cycle through all previous commands you typed that started with 'x ='. This was an awesome awesome feature in Matlab (and if you have heard of Julia, it has done it even better by allowing you to automatically re-enter entire blocks of code, such as when you are defining functions at the interactive prompt)
Both of these features appear to not be present in the ordinary python interactive shell. I believe tab autocomplete has been discussed before and can probably be enabled using the .pythonrc startup script and some modules; however I have not found anything about "up-button" completion. Python does have rudimentary up-button functionality that simply scrolls through all previous commands, but you can't type in the beginning of the command and have that narrow down the range of commands that are scrolled through, and that makes a huge difference.
Anyone know any way to get this functionality on the ordinary python interactive shell, without going to any fancy things like IPython notebooks that require separate installation?
Use iPython or some other Python shell. There are plenty. You may even program your own that will do whatever you want.
python "up-button" command completion, matlab/julia style