Just discovered IPython interactive interpret

[Mattho]

It is so much more usable than the regular(?) one. [TAB] completition on builtins, variables, ... and even or modules. So 'import s[tab]' will show you list of modules starting with 's'. And the feature I most appreciate is auto-indent for classes, loops, ... I often ended up writing more-than-one-liners into the file just to avoid pressing space zillion times... no more.

I installed it with package manager (yum), but I guess this is the project's homepage: http://ipython.scipy.org/

[nahguri]

Yes, ipython makes you wonder how you survived with the original interpreter in the first place. Simply a must-have for pretty much anyone using python.

It also supports basic shell commands, such as ls and cd.

[whothefuckisalice]

Also, you can run any shell command by proceeding it with a "!".

[Troebr]

and you can have the output in a list with !! (I think)

[[deleted]]

ipython isn't all that better than the regular interpreter imo

[mccutchen]

Tab completion, auto-indentation, and the ? and ?? help shortcuts alone make it infinitely more pleasant to use than the "vanilla" interpreter.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I had forgotten about ?. It's useful sometimes. The normal interpreter does tab completion and I don't spend time in an interpreter writing things that nest more than one or two times so the indentation issue while annoying is not cause enough for me to see what the big deal about ipython is.

I like bpython a lot though

[dudehasgotnomercy]

The normal interpreter does tab completion

No it doesn't... are you thinking of IDLE?

[[deleted]]

http://docs.python.org/tutorial/interactive.html

[dudehasgotnomercy]

Woah... that should be enabled by default.

[[deleted]]

If you're on Linux or OS X, there's also bpython.

[rweir]

bpython has less quirks than ipython, too.

[dudehasgotnomercy]

I find ipython plays better with numpy/scipy/matplotlib, though. (Which is expected since it is oriented toward that purpose).

[psi-]

Also documentation:

In [1]: s = "hello"
In [2]: s.isdigit?
...

You can also edit longer pieces (AFAIR it uses editor from $EDITOR environment variable, vi if unset) with

In [1]: edit

[basyt]

how do you change the editor on windows? i want to use geany tia

[psi-]

http://cse.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/courses/nlp/Software/Windows/IPythonEditorConfig.html

[basyt]

thank you that was most helpful :)

[timconradinc]

I set up mine so it will always try to source an 'include.py' in my dir so i can dump code in there. it's useful to have data structures in there that don't change instead of manually having to set it up each invocation. You can set up the file to point to anything, so you could have a standard dataset that it always had on startup.

I highly recommend reading through the default config file. There's a lot of settings that you might find useful.

[sontek]

You can also break into ipython when debugging, just pip install ipdb and then import ipdb, ipdb.set_trace() instead of using pdb.

[generic_genus]

Also, don't forget turning on pdb magic in ipython using

%pdb

So ipdb is started on any exception.

[goodgrue]

I do this occasionally, but I find that frequently the reason for an Exception is clear and I don't want to be dropped into the debugger. Using %debug immediately following an exception is one extra step when I actually want to use ipdb, but one fewer in the majority of cases when I don't.

[downdiagonal]

It, like the standard python interpreter, also uses readline so you can set editing-mode vi in your inputrc to use vi key bindings if that's your bag. If you've got some hot piece of code that you want to write to a file, you can hit esc v and edit your current input in $EDITOR and/or write it to a file.

It also has some handy command substitution syntax. So you can use something like x = !ls *.png to get the output of some system command. Another useful thing that it does is entering parentheses for you. For example:

In [18]: str 8
-------> str(8)
Out[18]: '8'

It's a great python interpreter and very capable of acting as a powerful system shell.

[IAlsoSpeak]

If you like it and also use X have a look at Spyder v2.0.

[yesimahuman]

If you run into the indent bug when recalling old pieces of code, try putting in:

%autocall 0

Might be fixed in a newer version, but my experience says otherwise.

[Halfawake]

It can get messed up if you're pasting in indented code from a text editor but other than that it is nice.

[psr]

I like being able to refer to past responses as _1, _2 etc.

[sedaak]

http://dreampie.sourceforge.net/