PyCon: IPython: Getting the Most out of Working Interactively in Python

IPython is an amazing replacement for the standard Python shell. As a result of this talk, I've already switched.

• It's embeddable so that you can add a shell into your existing applications.
• You can even use it as a replacement for your UNIX shell because it's so easy to interact with UNIX command line utilities.
• He mentioned "ipython -p tutorial", but I can't figure out what it does.
• It has better introspection, tab completion, color, syntax highlighting, and debugger integration.
• It was inspired by Mathematica.
• It has macros.
• It takes care of moving content to and from your editor so you don't have to cut and paste and remove the ">>>" at the beginning of each line.
• It can trivially lookup code definitions and docs while you're working on something.
• It has a better version of the "dir" function.
• It has various, useful "magic" commands.
• Doing things like "!ls" lets you talk to the shell. In this way, it's easy to do some UNIX shell scripting.
• It has support for timing and profiling.
• It has a nicer version of pdb called ipdb.
• In stack traces, it can show the syntax highlighted code as well as all the data.
• You can use ipython to dynamically code GUIs that have event loops that would block the normal interpreter.
• In general, ipython knows how to work with the event loops of many different libraries.